After more than three decades in the economic development shadows, Alabama’s burgeoning biotechnology sector crept into the 2005 spotlight wooing millions from investors and promising thousands of new jobs before the end of the decade. “It has been a good year, starting and growing companies, raising capital, IPOs, building incubators, investing in institutes which will generate future technology, and closing on multimillion-dollar pharmaceutical deals,” says Matthew Gonda, chairman of the Biotechnology Association of Alabama. “In comparing the 2005 timeframe to the last several years, it is clear that 2005 reaped the benefit of our efforts to mine technology in the state, and is a year that is particularly demonstrative of our growth,” he says, pointing to 12 new bio-related startup companies clustered primarily in Birmingham, Huntsville and Auburn. “Entrepreneurs are on the rise and capturing the intellectual and commercial value of the money being spent on education in our universities.” Indeed, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Research Foundation, the university’s nonprofit commercialization arm, is on track to more than double its budgeted revenue for fiscal year 2005, raking in somewhere between $11 million and $12 million, about three-quarters of which will be attributed to royalties alone. The figure might seem insignificant for an institution that is currently conducting external research funded in excess of $500 million, but cumulative royalties distributed back to the university’s inventors and their respective departments and schools through 2004 total only $16.8 million.
