At a biotechnology conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Thursday, Gov. Martin O?Malley said Israeli-based drug company BioLineRX USA would be locating its American offices in Rockville to better collaborate with the medical research institutions and biomedical companies already in the area.
“The rapid expansion and advancement of our clinical and pre-clinical pipeline now puts us in a prime position to enter into strategic alliances and partnerships,” Dr. Morris Laster, BioLineRX?s chief executive officer, said in a statement. That particularly applies to a new drug for the treatment of schizophrenia now in phase II of clinical trials, the second stage of getting a product approved for public distribution. It also applies to another drug for acute heart attacks that is at an earlier stage of testing.
Teva Pharmaceuticals and other key Israel life science players founded the company five years to ago to partner with researchers and biotech companies in commercializing promising drugs from their early stages of discovery. Teva recently acquired CoGenesys, a Rockville biopharmaceutical firm developing long-acting drugs.
The federal Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health are also in Montgomery County, one of the reasons for the strong growth of pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the Interstate 270 corridor. This made Rockville “a natural choice for opening our U.S. subsidiary,” Laster said.
In addition to these factors, “our competitive advantage is our work force,” O?Malley said at the Biosciences Workforce Conference last week. The state has already created a board with representatives from industry, schools and universities to develop programs for increasing the number of technical workers in the life sciences, along with those with higher degrees.
The state labor department estimates that over the next six years, jobs in the biosciences in Maryland will grow at 1 1/2 times the rate of those in other occupations.
