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More on Boston vs. Philly - biotech edition

Last week I asked why big drug companies were moving biotech jobs from Philly to Boston and other brainy centers. Some thoughtful replies:

Roy Rosin, chief innovation officer at Penn Medicine and a Harvard transplant, says his heart is very much in Philadelphia.
Roy Rosin, chief innovation officer at Penn Medicine and a Harvard transplant, says his heart is very much in Philadelphia.Read moreFrom Penn Medicine info video

Last week I asked why big drug companies were moving biotech jobs from Philly to Boston and other brainy centers. Some thoughtful replies:

The University of Pennsylvania is no Harvard, argues Douglas Simon, a former Penn anesthesiologist- turned-financial adviser.

He's not dissing Philadelphia science. He's blaming a persistent divide between scholarship and sales.

"The roots of this go very deep into our history and culture, as well as to the goals of our institutions," Simon told me.

He says schools led by Penn have a strong record of training medical leaders and piling up NIH-backed research - but they have avoided involvement with "commercial enterprises," which were viewed as "crass and not intellectually honest." It's one reason Philly scholars, when they turn to business, have tended to leave town, Simon says.

He similarly attributes the lack of a Philly-based Microsoft or Google to Penn's Wharton business school. As a training ground for finance, hedge fund, and real estate moguls, Wharton sees itself "as a global institution that by accident of history and geography happens to be in Philadelphia," leaving to Drexel and other local schools the old academic role of helping launch and grow firms here.

I quoted to him Penn scholars who have lately demonstrated steps to start-up and business collaboration. Simon says he'll believe it when more leading figures here raise investment funds that target local start-ups in the "two-way corridor between academic and commercial ventures."

"Boston is hot because of proximity - you can bump into a colleague," or an investor, "waiting in line for coffee," offers Martin Lehr, chief executive at Context Therapeutics, a Drexel spin-off working on brain and cancer therapies.

Lehr says Philly needs more "economic incentives" and locally focused venture investors to cluster biotech firms around colleges and the University City Science Center.

And: "Swagger," says Lehr. He counts "200 open jobs" listed at made-in-Philly biotechs like Spark Therapeutics and Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, and transplants like Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Adaptimmune, and WuXi Cell Therapeutics that moved here seeking talent. He says we should brag more about this.

Mount Airy public-policy consultant Dan Hoffman wants the city to focus not just on chamber of commerce-backed tax reforms, but also on Philly-centric efforts - such as aligning the region's older patients with public research and federal insurance programs. He says Philly could be "the Silicon Valley of geriatric medicine - not the sexiest goal" but a sensible growth niche.

I asked Roy Rosin, chief innovation officer at Penn Medicine and himself a transplant from Harvard, Stanford, and Silicon Valley, about scholars vs. salespeople. "Some of that conservatism may remain," he acknowledged. "We have a ways to go. We don't yet have all the capital and all the fluid talent."

But Rosin also named a long string of Penn scholars building bridges to industry and between its medical, business, engineering, and design students.

"I loved living in both Boston and Menlo Park; they're incredible places with incredible people," Rosin concluded. "But I see as much high-potential work" here as anywhere in the U.S. "I'd rather house my team in Philly, at this point."

JoeD@phillynews.com

215-854-5194@PhillyJoeD

www.inquirer.com/phillydeals