Hey, Dont Forget the Puget Sound Life Sciences Universe!
Summary
The WTIA study examined the career paths of company founders who started at a place like Microsoft or the University of Washington before they gained critical experience and inspiration to go off and create something new.Nothing quite like this visual poster has ever been done for the Puget Sound’s life sciences community, but Sanjaya Joshi reminded me of an analysis of Seattle’s biotech roots that he drew up in a 2004 paper, and updated in 2007.Joshi, president of Kirkland, WA-based Userspace, runs an IT services company for biotech organizations that have extreme data needs, like the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.He notes that his analysis isn’t fully up to date and, for example, doesn’t account for the loss of Merck’s Rosetta Inpharmatics division—which spun out of the founding efforts of Stephen Friend and Lee Hartwell at the Hutch, as well as Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology.Of course, the loss of Icos a couple years ago led to the creation of Seattle-based Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, and an intriguing TB Drug Discovery Initiative inside the Infectious Disease Research Institute.