“The MassBio Industry Snapshot records something Massachusetts has never seen before: the first contraction of our life sciences workforce since the Life Sciences Initiative passed in 2008—roughly 3,600 jobs lost, and the losses concentrated in research and development, the intellectual core of the industry.
These numbers didn’t fall out of the sky. They are the predictable result of a policy environment that squeezes the very companies we are counting on to cure disease. When Washington sets out to control drug prices, it is also controlling how much research those companies can afford to do.
The mechanism is not complicated. Biopharma companies fund their own pipelines out of their own revenues. The Inflation Reduction Act’s price controls drain those revenues at the source. You cannot pull billions out of an industry’s top line and then act surprised when it cuts the R&D jobs that top line was paying for.
This is not a story about the federal funding spigot running dry. Massachusetts remains the strongest recipient of NIH funding per capita in the nation. More to the point, NIH dollars fund basic science the front end of a pipeline that takes ten or fifteen years to reach a patient. Job Growth in biotech is not due to government funding but in innovation in finding new therapies.
The Snapshot also shows China accelerating past Europe in the global drug pipeline while the United States grows by less than one percent. China is a real competitor — but let us be honest about why it is gaining. It is not out-inventing us. It is out-lasting us, because we have chosen to handicap our own industry. We are not losing ground to China on the merits. We are losing it on policy, and the remedy is in Washington, not Beijing.
The one piece of good news is that this is self-inflicted, which means it is also self-correctable. Massachusetts still has the best science on earth. What it needs is a federal policy that does not work against it. Washington needs to reexamine their policy on price controls.”
Bill Smith, Director of PLSI, Pioneer Institute
