Boston biotech hub spawns more jobs, grabs big share of VC bucks

It's no secret that Massachusetts is home to one of the biggest biotech hubs in the world. World-class researchers at MIT and Harvard in Cambridge have joined hands with a phalanx of venture groups to spawn an annual crop of new biotechs while Big Pharma focuses more and more of its R&D work in the region.

This year's annual report from MassBio underscores all those trends, noting that the state can now boast of an army of 26,000 R&D workers. And in a first-time occurrence, the trade association found that 40% of the 900 drugs in the state's big pipeline are experimental cancer treatments. MassBio also reports that between May 2010 and April 2011, a total of 217 candidate drugs advanced in the pipeline.

MassBio also reported that after seeing an anemic one percent growth in biotech jobs in 2009, that number jumped to 3.9 percent last year. And the state's drug developers claimed close to one of every four venture dollars provided to biotech companies.

- here's the annual report from MassBio