From Banktown to high-tech Biotown?

By Christopher D. Kirkpatrick
ckirkpatrick@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Friday, Aug. 08, 2008

Now thought of as Banktown, Charlotte could soon start marketing itself as a hub of medical manufacturing companies and others connected to the life sciences.

The Charlotte Chamber says there are hundreds of unheralded companies in the area that turn scientific research into real products, such as artificial limbs and sterilization equipment. Many have sprung from the region's old-line manufacturing past.

Marketing the Charlotte area as a successful home to specialized manufacturing would be a high-tech addition to an image once defined by textiles and more recently by the rise of big industries such as banking and motorsports.

That news could be used as potent advertising to lure fresh investment to the 16-county region and build on the momentum of the $1.5 billion North Carolina Research Campus under construction in Kannapolis, said Erin Watkins, research director for the chamber.

To try and prove its point, the chamber won a $50,000 grant in June from the state-funded N.C. Biotechnology Center to research and define the area's biotech companies and their numbers. An initial study last year surprised Charlotte boosters because it suggested more than 500 companies connected to the life sciences were operating in the region. The chamber sought the grant to take a closer look at the operations, some mom-and-pop outfits largely unnoticed by the broader business community.

It would be one of several sectors that have existing clusters of businesses in the region that economic developers see as strengths, such as banking, defense, motorsports and energy companies, among others.

To be sure, the Charlotte region isn't and probably won't ever be a biotech hub on the order of Boston, San Diego, San Francisco or Raleigh. Those areas are famous for their multi-billion dollar research and drug-manufacturing economies based on international drug conglomerates and major universities, such as MIT and Harvard. More here.