• Healthcare investing doesn’t behave like software. Biotech, medical devices and digital health create jobs (and risk) on very different timelines, complicating place-based economic development.
• The life sciences real estate “hangover” is uneven. While Boston and the Bay Area digest oversupply, Philadelphia and Baltimore are still filling labs and capturing leasing activity.
• Jobs are a key signal. Life sciences R&D employment has grown for a decade straight, reinforcing why long-term bets like Baltimore’s 4MLK still make sense despite short-term market volatility.
Jane Shaab wants more breakthrough science, so naturally she’s excited for the new coffee bar.
Shaab is the longstanding executive director of the University of Maryland BioPark, a tidy urban research park just west of downtown Baltimore. One year ago, leaders unveiled 4MLK, a gleaming new addition overlooking Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, long a cultural divide in Baltimore’s geography and psyche. The building, developed by Wexford Science & Technology with the help of $2 million in state and local loans, is one of a growing number of real estate investments aimed squarely at the life sciences.
Inside, one floor houses ConnectLabs, Wexford’s coworking-style answer for early-stage biotech and medtech startups, with shared access to expensive lab equipment and the proximity that spurs collaboration. Upstairs, University of Maryland faculty can take space as they spin out new companies. Downstairs, there’s the civic lounge — and soon, a coffee bar.
National life sciences R&D employment has increased every year for a decade.
It may sound trivial, but to Shaab, the coffee matters. It’s where proximity becomes possibility. “Science doesn’t happen in isolation,” she told me years ago, and the biopark she’s nurtured since 2005 remains proof of that thesis.
Years back, Shaab was unusual. I have a long-held criticism that most life sciences champions were far more interested in buildings than people.
As I toured 4MLK with Claire Murphy, who pointed out how an adjacent brick building is being renovated by a local restaurateur, the broader pattern came into focus: From Cambridge to Philadelphia to Houston, a generation of cities are betting that the sciences can drive urban dynamism like technology did in the 2010s.
The question, as always in economic development, is who benefits, and what kinds of companies actually grow jobs where they start.
Balancing ‘singles and doubles’ with home runs
The tension between economic development and scientific returns is one Kathie Jordan thinks about daily.
Jordan is the managing director of the healthcare investment group at Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, one of the country’s oldest public venture capital programs. Her team manages more than 70 healthcare and life sciences portfolio companies, spanning biotech, medical devices and digital health, all intersecting in one way or another with the sprawling healthcare industry that dominates the American economy.
Each category behaves differently. Biotech can take hundreds of millions of dollars and years of trials before success or failure. Medical devices are faster to commercialize and more likely to create local manufacturing jobs — “those engineers and technicians you can actually see working in a clean room,” Jordan said.
And digital health? “That’s where you get your singles and doubles,” she explained: smaller capital, faster exits, often without needing FDA clearance. They can move quickly, but they’re also less geographically bound. “They can have five people all over the globe to build something,” Jordan said, describing both the opportunity and the challenge of remote-era economic development.
In short, the risk and return profile of healthcare investing maps imperfectly to place-based goals. Some kinds of innovation hire locally; others scale virtually. For an investor charged with both growing a portfolio and a region’s tax base, the calculus isn’t simple.
The uneven hangover in life sciences real estate
From her vantage point, Jordan, in Philadelphia, is operating in a market that looks very different depending on where you draw the map.
National headlines focus on an apparent life sciences real estate hangover, and there is real pain in the biggest hubs. In the “Big 3” markets (Boston–Cambridge, the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego), average lab and R&D vacancy had climbed to about 22% near the end of 2024, up from roughly 5% between 2019–2022, according to data from commercial real estate and investment firm CBRE. By contrast, vacancy in eight other primary markets, including Philadelphia and the Washington–Baltimore corridor, was closer to 12%.
While the Big 3 posted about 5.3 million square feet of negative net absorption since 2023, the other major US markets collectively logged 1.9 million square feet of positive net absorption over the same period, CBRE analysts noted — and the total amount of occupied lab and R&D space in those markets “has never been higher.”
In other words: The frothiest mega-clusters may be digesting an overbuild, but places like Philly and Baltimore are still quietly filling lab space and adding tenants like those walking the halls of 4MLK.
New CBRE data reinforces that shift. In Q3 2025, several mid-tier and emerging markets, including Baltimore, Philadelphia and Raleigh-Durham, collectively captured a larger share of national life sciences leasing than at any point in the past decade, even as activity in Boston, San Diego and the Bay Area cooled.
There’s another signal worth watching: jobs. National life sciences R&D employment has increased every year for a decade, per CBRE’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, rising from about 187,000 workers in 2014 to nearly 290,000 in 2024.
Even as venture funding cooled and vacancy rates climbed in the Big 3 markets, the scientific workforce kept expanding, increasingly in markets beyond Boston and the Bay Area. For economic development leaders, that’s the metric that matters. The demand for scientific talent remains durable, and that’s exactly what campuses like 4MLK are built to capture.
The economic geography of innovation
Those market-level numbers show up in Jordan’s day-to-day decisions. Several of Ben Franklin Technology Partners’ medical device companies have expanded their in-house manufacturing lines — companies building orthopedic anchors or cardiovascular tools that require clean rooms, technicians and physical goods that must be shipped. Those are the kinds of stories economic development officials like: visible jobs you can tour.
Biotech is different. Many of those companies stay virtual far longer, outsourcing lab work to contract research organizations or sponsoring research back into universities. Headcounts may stay small until a drug candidate reaches clinical trials, at which point they suddenly need a dozen or more staff to manage dosing and data.
Digital health companies are different still. They can be three people on three continents, stitching together clinical knowledge and software. That flexibility can be good for founders and investors, but it complicates the traditional “How many jobs in my district?” question.
Jordan and her colleagues now pay closer attention to where leadership actually sits. “We like to see the CEO in-region,” she said, in part to reduce the risk that a company drifts away within a few years of investment. At the same time, Ben Franklin nudges teams toward the region’s incubators and office parks, trying to convert remote-first startups into at least partially rooted firms.
Aging America’s next opportunity
Jordan is also watching another macro trend that ties health innovation directly to demographic reality: aging.
She sees growing entrepreneurial interest in elder care and dementia care platforms and recently backed Wovenly, which is working in that space. With an aging population and a shrinking share of people in their peak caregiving years, “We’re going to need game-changing solutions” for how care is delivered, she told me. That could mean software, devices, new clinical workflows or some combination.
For economic development leaders, that’s not just a sector thesis. It’s a workforce and land-use challenge: training technicians, zoning flexible lab space, and supporting investors like Ben Franklin or Maryland’s TEDCO who can connect regional research assets to companies that build solutions here. Few expect AI to disrupt the need for physical lab space anytime soon.
Back in Baltimore, 4MLK’s civic lounge, where residents and researchers can literally sit side by side, feels like a metaphor for that intersection. Construction started in 2022 and was delivered on time. Maryland’s lieutenant governor called the building a testament to partnership, noting that progress “doesn’t happen in isolation.”
Neither does science. If the next generation of healthcare investors can align their portfolios with the places they call home, we might just get both: better outcomes and stronger economies.
