April 4, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SEATTLE – Juno Therapeutics and other biotech companies may be forced to look for a new home outside of Washington if state lawmakers do not address a tax policy that unfairly targets medical research, Juno’s Hans Bishop said during a recent healthcare panel, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported this morning.
Bishop, chief executive officer of Juno, said the state needs to provide incentives to biotech companies in order to spur growth from existing companies and to attract small and mid-sized biotech companies to the region. Bishop said the state’s talent pool needs to be built up, which will happen through fostering innovation. He said Juno has had to attract more than half of its 300 employees from out of state.
Some of Washington’s negative tax policy issues include the 2015 sunset of a research and development tax credit that offset other taxes, such as the business and occupation tax, the Journal said. Companies have to pay the tax whether they make money or not, which is hard on startups, Seattle Business Magazine reported. In addition to the B&O tax, Washington lawmakers also cut funding to the state’s Life Sciences Discovery Fund, which was created to help startups and small companies, the Journal said.
“My shareholders complain when we have to pay tax when we are still losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year,” Bishop said, according to the Business Journal. “The first order of business is we have to get rid of the things that make us an unattractive place to be.”
If lawmakers do not act to incentivize the biotech sector in Washington, he said within the next decade the state’s top companies could relocate to areas that are willing to provide better financial arrangements, such as Massachusetts. Mark Cummings, vice president of Life Sciences Washington, a public policy advocacy group, told the Journal that a state like Massachusetts provides numerous tax breaks for the biotech industry, which is one reason it’s become the top biotech hub in the eastern United States.
Recently Dennis Kroft, vice president of marketing and membership for Life Science Washington, told the Journal there are some challenges companies are facing in recruiting employees to the Pacific Northwest. With a struggling education system, Kroft said the local pharma companies are “giving supplementary training to graduates of Washington universities while struggling to attract middle- and upper-level workers.” Additionally, Seattle is not seen as a large market area, which means perspective employees have fewer options for fall-back positions if they suddenly find themselves in need of another position in the industry, Kroft told the Journal.
White-hot Juno has been on a tear through 2015. The Seattle-based company has been on a hiring spree for the past two years. Juno’s website lists dozens of positions in manufacturing, medical, quality assurance, research, marketing and more. Juno is developing cell-based cancer immunotherapies based on chimeric antigen receptor and high-affinity T cell receptor technologies to genetically engineer T cells to recognize and kill cancer. In July, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Juno’s Investigational New Drug application for JCAR015 for treatment of adult patients with relapsed/refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which will allow the company to initiate Phase II clinical trials. In June 2015, Juno’s oncology research was bolstered after Celgene Corporation ’s took a $1 billion stake in the company to leverage combined immunology and oncology expertise to develop treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
