Several years ago, I gave a science lesson to my daughter’s fifth-grade class.
I held up my Ph.D. dissertation and said, “See this black book? It’s 255 pages and took 6 years of my life. One entire year was spent developing a new technique for scrambling DNA to study how proteins work. This can now be done by a high school student in a week, and the results of my work are now obsolete. Can anyone tell me what ‘obsolete’ means?”
We may never be Boston — we don’t need to be — but that shouldn’t diminish the assets and accomplishments we do have, and investment in the region is growing.
One of the students raised her hand and said, “Junk?”
I still think about that moment. Not because she was wrong. Because she was right: Science’s purpose is to make yesterday’s hard-won tools eventually invisible.
That is exactly where we are with precision medicine and cell and gene therapy, a central asset of the Greater Philadelphia region. We have witnessed remarkable clinical successes that were almost unimaginable 10 years ago: durable and curative medicines for cancers, life-altering gene therapies, and other new technologies emerging every day.
But the future of these new interventions cannot hinge on excitement and speculation alone. Sustainable success requires a fundamental shift towards intentional development.
That shift is now being applied to the precision medicine industry, where the science driving these interventions is not met equally by the ability to commercialize them and the ability to pay for them. High costs and manufacturing complexity collide with hard questions about commercial viability, regulation and cost coverage. Investor exuberance fades. High-profile programs shut down.
Yet, the global market is projected to grow from $22 billion worldwide in 2024 to over $120 billion in 2034, almost 19% per year. While the US remains the largest market, Asia is the fastest-growing.
If the United States does not invest in cementing life sciences leadership, we will lose the life sciences race.
Why here, why now?
Few other regions in the country have the breadth and depth of assets in precision medicine that we have in Greater Philadelphia and the ability to address these national challenges. We’ve done this before.
The early days of antibody therapeutics, led by Centocor, also carried prohibitively high costs and limited targets, yet became broadly accessible through coordinated infrastructure, process innovation and technology advancement, and now represents an over $200 billion market.
Now we have the same opportunity, kick-started by Philadelphia-based Spark Therapeutics’ (now Roche) Luxterna, the FDA’s first-ever approval of gene therapy for inherited disease. This isn’t just legacy — it’s momentum. The regional infrastructure is catching up to the science to keep it moving forward. We can invent it here, validate it here, make it here, test it here, house it here, people it here and keep it here.
A quick scan of the region’s “where it happens” buildout shows how fast Greater Philadelphia is expanding its life-sciences footprint. Led by Wexford and Brandywine, it collectively represents over 1.7 million square feet and nearly $2 billion in private investment in new labs, offices and manufacturing space delivered in the last three years.
Hubs like the Bellwether District, Delaware Innovation Space and the Pennovation Center are already delivering new capacity, while projects like Breakthrough, the Coriell Innovation Center in Camden and other sites remain under construction.
We may never be Boston — we don’t need to be — but that shouldn’t diminish the assets and accomplishments we do have, and investment in the region is growing:
- Merck began construction on a $1 billion, 470,000-square-foot biologics center of excellence in Wilmington, with expectations of more than 500 full-time roles, lab operations by 2028 and investigational production by 2030.
- Thermo Fisher opened its East Coast flagship Advanced Therapies Collaboration Center in Philadelphia, inside a newly expanded 53,000-square-foot BioLabs for Advanced Therapeutics space, designed to give startups direct access to expert scientists and advanced process development.
- Eli Lilly chose Philadelphia for a Gateway Lab at Breakthrough Labs in Center City, its newest on the East Coast.
Plus, PROPEL, the National Center for Precision Medicine, is maturing as an EDA-designated Regional Tech Hub. The center integrates its regional partners to reduce manufacturing and clinical trial times, train the next generation of technologically competent workers, support new businesses and ultimately reduce cost while increasing safety and access.
The pipeline here isn’t abstract. It spans real programs by regional players across major indications — from melanoma and B-cell cancers to autoimmune disease and liver failure — at stages ranging from preclinical to commercialized.
But these collective assets are only meaningful if they produce access. As Phillip Vinek of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy put it: “We can’t leave people behind. We have to find ways to make therapies and interventions much more available to people around the world.”
A personal perspective, and a regional responsibility
I’m a homer. I have been part of the Philadelphia life sciences community for over 50 years, from the Wistar Institute to Einstein Medical Center, from the “University of Centocor” as employee number 18 to Temple Med, from helping build Puresyn, Inc. to now entering my 20th year at Ben Franklin Technology Partners.
Today, I have the privilege of leading the PROPEL Tech Hub effort, and our success in recruiting, engaging and gaining commitments from all our 70+ partners is essential to delivering these new interventions to the people who need them.
At a recent conference, Jonathan Epstein, dean of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, said he is seeing “much more openness” to new partnership models that could speed development, and that we might end up with a “different playbook.” For the first time in decades, I couldn’t agree more.
If cell and gene therapy truly holds transformative potential to treat and cure previously intractable diseases, we must eliminate the barriers to widespread availability. We have a unique opportunity to coalesce this region’s assets to change this dynamic, to reengineer cell and gene therapy for the future.
The fifth graders were right to call my thesis “junk.” Not because it lacked value, but because it did not do the other thing we hope science will do: open our eyes to real miracles.
This is Philadelphia’s precision medicine moment: not only to lead the next wave of cures, but to build the systems that make those cures scalable, affordable and accessible.
