By Jesse McCool, The Oklahoman
The birth of the biomanufacturing industry is dawning in Oklahoma. With the BIOSECURE Act legislation reaching critical momentum in the U.S. House, last month, the impetus to compete fairly will give way to big opportunities to build capacity, create good-paying jobs here, and help improve access to cutting-edge medicines right here in Oklahoma.
In 2023, the U.S. biotechnology market size was estimated at $552 billion with roughly half of the market comprising health care innovations. There are novel therapeutic agents made by living systems that change lives for the better. It’s expected to grow to over $1 trillion in the next 10 years driven by human health needs and macro-economic forces. The health care sector dominates the biotech market; but due to rising research and development costs, the outsourcing of scaled production (i.e. biomanufacturing) to offshore biotech service providers has been a way for biotech firms to stretch their cash.
Since 2022, with President Joe Biden’s “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy,” there has been a whole-of-government effort underway to drive the expansion of domestic biomanufacturing capacity to support U.S. biotechnology. Nice idea? But how to ensure that biotech companies can still manage the escalating research and development costs? Oklahoma holds part of the answer.
Oklahoma has played a relatively small but steady role in the U.S. biotechnology industry with only a small share of National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) annual $45 billion budget. Over the last five years, Oklahoma entities have been awarded over $660 million NIH dollars.