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Collaboration, from customizing workforce training to preparing shovel-ready sites, has nourished North Carolina’s life-sciences industry for more than 40 years. New programs ensure that support will continue into the future.
Fujifilm Biosciences opened one of North America’s largest commercial-scale cell culture factories in September. The more than $3 billion investment measures 1 million square feet and will employ 750 people by year’s end. It’s expected to add 300,000 square feet when it reaches capacity in 2028 and employ 1,400 by 2031. “North Carolina is creating the future of biotech, and Fujifilm is an industry leader,” Gov. Josh Stein said at the ribbon cutting. “This overall project will grow our state’s economy by $4.7 billion over the next decade.”
Growth was a pillar of Research Triangle Park’s master plan in 1984, when state leaders began investing in the state’s future economy. Traditional manufacturing — tobacco products, textiles and furniture — was declining. “North Carolina’s leaders realized that genetic engineering and other new technologies from bioscience research labs had enormous potential,” says Mark Phillips, N.C. Biotechnology Center vice president of statewide operations and executive director of its eastern regional office in Greenville. “They also knew that technology could transform some of North Carolina’s largest industries, notably agriculture and medicine.”
Fujifilm is the latest in a steady stream of life-sciences companies that have invested in North Carolina. More than 840 of these companies do business here and employ 75,000 people, according to N.C. Biotechnology Center. Include the 2,500 businesses that support this industry, and employment swells to 225,000 statewide. Growing the industry, which made more than $10 billion in investments last year alone, is a community effort.
North Carolina’s biomanufacturing corridor stretches from Winston-Salem’s Innovation Quarter, which is home to more than 90 companies and 3,600 employees, to the BioPharma Cresent, which arcs through Edgecombe, Johnston, Nash, Pitt and Wilson counties. The latter has been called one of the East Coast’s largest biopharma manufacturing concentrations.
It employs more than 10,000 people and continues to grow. Six projects, representing more than $6.2 billion in investments, were announced last year.
Scott Ralls is president of Wake Technical Community College. It’s his latest post in a career with the N.C. Community College System that stretches nearly three decades. He has watched the biotechnology industry grow during that time, and he says its recent spurt is the culmination of years of hard work and investment. Those efforts have built a business-friendly environment that’s filled with shovel-ready sites, a falling corporate tax, and rail, road and air connections to consumers around the world. And there’s plenty of mechanics in place to ensure companies have the workforce they need to succeed.
Wake Tech serves about 75,000 students across its eight campuses. “One of the things the community colleges and universities attempt to do is to keep scaling to support our new and existing industries,” Ralls says. “Today, we have four times the number of students in biotechnology programs than we did four years ago and a myriad programs we didn’t
have before.”
Ralls and his team train, upskill and reskill workers. That’s done through traditional courses and training tuned to each company’s exact needs. The college partnered with CSL Seqirus, Fujifilm and Eli Lilly, for example, to create the country’s first eight-month program for training advanced maintenance technicians. And it collaborates with Amgen to provide training programs for its recent $1.5 billion investment in Holly Springs. Amgen also sponsors a co-laboratory at Wake Tech’s RTP campus, where technologists and industry professionals collaborate on innovations.
The community college system’s customized workforce training is available to existing businesses, too, and it’s often offered before the first dirt is turned for new locations and expansions. “We actually get involved with proposals when companies begin making the decisions about when to locate here,” Ralls says. NCEdge, for example, develops training solutions that address the participating company’s immediate challenges and prepare it for the future.
Collaborations between companies and colleges are becoming more common. “We have established a brand-new Lilly Center for Science and Technology, and next August we’re opening Fujifilm Hall on our new campus in Apex,” Ralls says. “Our biopharma partners work with us on apprenticeship programs, and that wasn’t happening four years ago.”
Partnerships across the 58-college system increase capacity. Wake Tech and Durham Technical Community College launched RTP Bio. It unifies the talent pipeline for the industry. “We have this notion that our economic development partners are part of an ecosystem,” Ralls says. “But to me, it is really a community. I’m very close with my colleagues at other community colleges, NC State University and our industry partners, and it feels like we’re all building it together.”
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