Institute For The Future

Scripps Florida: The Elderly as Early Adopters of Biomedical Innovation

I just returned from a brief vacation in Jupiter, Florida. As Woody Allen once famously said, "seventy percent of success in life is showing up." I often find that this is the case in research, especially when cities and regions are what you study. You need to be open to serendipitous discoveries as you travel.

 

The big find in Jupiter, on the cover of last week's Palm Beach Post, was the the ribbon-cutting for the permanent home of Scripps Florida, the 4-year old branch of the La Jolla, Calif.-based Scripps Research Institute. The new 350,000 square foot facility is a major node in the archipelago of biomedical research centers that are being built across Florida.

 

One of the more obviously notable characteristic of Florida is that you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a senior citizen. While some people might think of it as a liability given the looming crises in health care finance, that large senior population has been a tremendous political and economic asset to the state for decades. In a world where future economic growth will be deeply intertwined with health care, those old people are going to be a huge asset.

 

Why? Because they provide a perfect built-in market and eager "early adopter" community for biomedical innovation. They are Florida's biomedical equivalent of the San Francisco Bay Area's digerati.

 

For about the last year, I've been thinking quite a bit about geospatial logic of biomedical research. It's a timely topic, as the stimulus package just authorized $1 billion for construction and improvement of biomedical research facilities. (link to NIH info on the grants)

 

In the past, industries clustered around key inputs, such as raw materials like iron and coal (think of Pittsburgh). More recently, as Richard Florida has so eloquently argued, knowledge industries chase labor and the lifestyle amenities they seek (think of Seattle or Silicon Valley). But while biomedical research certainly follows some of Florida's logic, there is another "input" that seems to be governing the placing of biomedical R&D in places like Jupiter. Put simply, the clinical nature of biomedical research requires it to be embedded within large, easily accessed patient populations.

 

While a great deal of late-stage drug trials are now out-sourced and off-shored far from the labs where they developed, early-stage trials and non-pharmaceutical biomedical technologies benefit tremendously from close interaction between doctors and patients. In the purest sense of the word, biomedical R&D is a clinical avocation - "concerned with or based on actual observation and treatment of disease in patients rather than experimentation or theory". (via dictionary.com)

 

Scripps Florida has already produced a number of compelling innovations. It is also having an economic impact. "According to the Governor's Office, over the next 15 years, Scripps Florida is projected to create 6,500 new jobs and generate about $1.6 billion in additional income to Floridians, while boosting the state's Gross Domestic Product by $3.2 billion."

 

It hasn't come cheap, "To date, total investment in Scripps Florida from the state and from Palm Beach County has been nearly $500 million, which is going toward construction of the new campus, recruitment of top scientists from around the world, and start-up costs plus salaries, benefits, and equipment through 2013."

 

But it is a solid foundation for growth. Scripps Florida has cornered what may be the ultimate pole position in the biomedical innovation race, firmly ensconcing itself in the largest and most at-risk chronic disease community in the world: Florida's senior citizens.

 

 

Link to full Scripps Florida press release (source of above quotes): link