March 27, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Sr. Editor
Happy Birthday, BioSpace! This month marks the 30th anniversary of BioSpace—and that means we here in the newsroom are taking a look back at all the major milestones for biotech in the last three decades, as the sector, and its innovations, have boomed. By March 2015, BioSpace has published more than 600,000 news stories from about 23,000 life science companies. Scroll down to see both the history of biotech and BioSpace’s story!
Jennifer King founded BioSpace originally in 1985 and focused on promoting bioscience hotbed communities via traditional publishing (e.g. CD-ROM), and later launched it as a website in 1995. She reminisced about the site and all it has accomplished, and shared her own timeline with us as we look back.
In 1995, the East Coast launch of BioSpace and promotional art unveiling entitled “Genetown” took place to a crowd of over 400 biotech executives following the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council Annual Meeting. Those “hotbed” maps are now a hallmark of BioSpace’s brand and hotly anticipated by the biotech community each year.
“Twenty years ago today in Boston, Mass., a.k.a. Beantown, a.k.a. ‘Genetown’ I gave birth to my first baby, BioSpace.com. On March 15th, 1995, BioSpace was one of the first 50,000 websites in the world. We launched the site in front of 300 biotech CEOs, and it worked! BioSpace was and remains today the hub site for the biotech and pharmaceutical industry,” said King.
The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center’s Board of Directors held a meeting on March 18 to award $19 million in tax incentives to 11 life sciences companies in the state. As a result, these businesses will create 1,075 new jobs for Massachusetts in 2015.
Today, millions of people are kept abreast of news and clinical trial developments via the aggregation of biotechnology and pharmaceutical company information worldwide, and thousands have found their jobs via the BioSpace Career Center.
“We grew the business to over 100 employees. When I stepped down from the helm we were generating over $5 million in revenue. While 1999 took us down a path with the [venture capital] community that I very much regret, I am grateful that my baby is alive and well today. I am proud to be an entrepreneur. I am proud to be a pioneer,” said King. “I am proud to be the founder of one of the first Internet companies that survived and continues to thrive well beyond The Bubble and three sales.”
BioSpace has seen a multitude of incarnations, first beginning as a community site, then morphing into a larger jobs hub, and now a prime resource for biotech and investor breaking news and features. Along the ways it has had multiple acquirers, mostly recently Dice Holdings, which gave us a new home in November 2013.
“BioSpace still brings companies in Biotech Bay, Biotech Beach, Genetown, Pharm Country and now all around the world together with the best employees,” said King. “Long live BioSpace.com!”
In honor of those decades playing a part in this community, we wanted to make a special BioSpace timeline. Where were you when you heard the news? Let us know in the comments below, or at the BioSpace Facebook Page or @biospace on Twitter, and we may print your story as a column!
