MD governor touts a booming biotech biz, new jobs

While the overall economy may be flagging, Maryland says that its biotech industry is booming. And the governor wants to keep the momentum going with a few new industry incentives.

Gov. Martin O'Malley told reporters that the biotech industry added more than a thousand jobs in the last three months; that's 10 percent of the state's total tally of new jobs. And he touted a report from Battelle Technology Partnership Practice claiming that the state's biotech industry has been expanding aggressively for the last several years.

While bioresearch funding at Johns Hopkins and other state universities swelled from $877 million to $1.3 billion between 2002 and 2007, O'Malley also pointed to a series of new policy initiatives that were needed to keep the drug development industry growing at the same pace. The initiatives outlined by Battelle included new tax and regulatory policies to encourage development work.

- here's the story from the Baltimore Business Journal

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