Over the last year, a remarkable success story has been unfolding in the Kansas City animal health corridor stretching from Manhattan, Kan., to Columbia, Mo., a corridor that is home to one-third of the $19 billion global animal health industry.
The first big news was the selection of Kansas State University as the future home of the $650 million National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, a world-class scientific research center with the mission of protecting the American food supply and agriculture economy.
The magnetic impact of that decision was quickly felt when a second federal research facility decided to move from Wyoming to Kansas to benefit from the concentration of animal health expertise and infrastructure here.
Then, in February, the Department of Homeland Security again highlighted our region’s national bioscience leadership with a $12 million award for an animal disease research center of excellence at K-State to be led by Kansas Bioscience Authority eminent scholar and Regents distinguished professor Juergen Richt.
The economic benefits emanating from this research trifecta will be tremendous, reaching into the billions of dollars over the next two decades.
That’s on top of the growth of local animal health companies. For example, animal vaccine manufacturer Ceva Biomune is undertaking a $15 million facility expansion in Lenexa.
Our region’s intense focus on the animal health sector is clearly paying big dividends, and the collaboration of many private and public sector partners has made it possible. Now we can build on these recent victories and further accelerate growth.
As a result, we will have targeted bioscience sectors in which our advantages are so well developed and well known that companies won’t be asking whether they should be here, but rather how they could be anywhere else.
Increasing the flow of venture capital into our community will be vital to this type of game-changing industry growth, so we must continue working to get the attention of investors who normally look at this as fly-over country.
The bioscience authority has made this a priority so we can jump-start the investment of private venture capital into high-potential bioscience companies that are working to successfully bring new products and services to the marketplace.
One of the world’s largest venture firms dedicated to life sciences recently announced it was establishing a Kansas City, Kan., regional office — its first outside of Boston and San Francisco — and we hope others will soon follow.
With these initiatives and others, we will stay on course with a strategy that invests heavily in commercialization while recognizing the vital importance of research and development, because each builds on the other.
This approach has positioned Kansas City to address national bioscience challenges and has created an environment in which bioscience researchers and business can thrive.
Thornton is president and CEO of the Kansas Bioscience Authority. He lives in Fairway.