Over the past decade, the North Carolina biomanufacturing industry cluster has grown to be the third largest in the country. Our state is home to some of the world's largest companies - Novozymes, Wyeth Vaccines, Biogen-Idec, Merck - making North Carolina a true hub of biomanufacturing and biotechnology. As a result of that success, the state can now boast a maturing biotechnology cluster that employs an estimated 18,000 people, including 4,400 in biomanufacturing.
Although North Carolina's biotechnology sector has historically been centered in urban areas, the industry's shift from research and development to manufacturing presents an important opportunity for creating new jobs and investment in non-urban counties. Clear examples of this trend can be seen in the 1980s migration of traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities to North Carolina, during which our state's rural areas enjoyed enormous manufacturing investment and job creation by these companies.
A second indicator that biomanufacturing will have a favorable long-term impact on rural North Carolina is the potential for development of plant-made pharmaceuticals and other plant-based biomanufactured products. Current biomanufacturing techniques are very expensive, so one promising strategy is to use genetically-modified plants to synthesize products. Such crops would still need to be processed in biomanufacturing facilities, but the costs of production could be much lower.
Our state's natural resources and agricultural heritage have produced farms large and small with the expertise and infrastructure to grow a new generation of value-added crops. North Carolina is also home to some of the strongest agricultural research programs in the world at North Carolina State and North Carolina A&T, as well as at industry giants such as BASF, Syngenta and Bayer Crop Science. This represents a significant opportunity to combine North Carolina's traditional agricultural resources with advanced biotechnology to produce new and affordable medicines as well as other plant-based biomanufacturing products. North Carolina is well positioned to take advantage of this opportunity.
