AMHERST — The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council — the state’s biotech trade group — is opening a “MassBio West” office at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The new office will be located at the university’s Institute for Applied Life Sciences, a $150-million building that opened in 2014 and is also home to the 30 state-of-the-art equipment “Core Facilities,” which researchers from private industry, academia or government can use for a fee while still retaining their intellectual property. MassBio’s president and CEO Robert Coughlin and UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy made the announcement of the office opening at an event Tuesday.
“The life sciences industry in Massachusetts has seen incredible growth over the last 10 years, forcing companies to think creatively about where they set up their operations,” Coughlin said in a statement. “It’s no longer necessary to be in the Boston-Cambridge area to take advantage of quality lab facilities and networking opportunities.”
One stated goal of the facilities has been to attract biotech companies to western Massachusetts to do research. To that end, UMass and MassBio have struck an agreement under which MassBio members receive a 10 percent discount at the Core Facilities.
Peter Reinhart, the director of the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, said in a statement that the institute “facilitates industry collaborations, new ventures and contributes to workforce development in the discovery, development, and manufacture of medical devices, biomolecules, and delivery vehicles.
“MassBio opening an office at IALS will help raise awareness of the unique resources available to MassBio’s extensive membership,” Reinhart said.
MassBio, which is a nonprofit, represents more than 1,100 “life sciences companies and organizations involved with the industry,” according to the organization’s website.
Represented on MassBio’s board of directors are a wide range of Massachusetts-based biotech businesses. Among them are some of the country’s biggest pharmaceutical companies — Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Bayer, for example — as well as Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences, and some of the other smaller companies contributing to the “biotech boom” the Boston area has seen in the last decade.
Coughlin, MassBio’s president and CEO, is a former state representative from Dedham who joined MassBio in 2007 after serving as an aide to then-governor Deval Patrick. The following year, the state Ethics Commission fined him $10,000 for seeking the MassBio job while simultaneously negotiating tax breaks for biotech companies in his job with the Patrick administration.
According to the Boston Globe, Coughlin’s most recent lobbying victory came when, after pressure from MassBio, state representatives amended language in the House budget that would limit the prices MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, pays for pharmaceuticals. The original language would have allowed the state to post what it thinks drugs are worth, but a compromise budget amendment removed that language.
The state has invested heavily in the life sciences, particularly at UMass Amherst. In addition to the $95 million the commonwealth put forward for the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, the state offers an “Innovation Voucher Program” that pays 75 percent of the cost for companies of 10 employees or less to use the Core Facilities, and 50 percent of the cost for companies with 50 employees or less.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.