Another year, another disappointment for the industry that people keep calling the future of Maryland's economy.
Last week, the best hope for one of the state's top biotechnology companies became a bust. Columbia-based Osiris Therapeutics disclosed that Prochymal, its stem-cell therapy for bone-marrow transplant patients, worked no better than a placebo in patient tests.
Osiris stock fell by nearly half. The company founded in 1992 has never made money. It lost $150 million the last four years. It soldiers on nevertheless.
Osiris "is committed to making Prochymal the first stem-cell therapy approved" by the FDA, CEO Randal Mills told investors after the results came out, according to BioWorld.
Maryland biotech and biotechnology generally are having that kind of decade.
New investments from venture capitalists have dwindled. (This is true for all start-up tech ventures, not just bio.) State budget problems caused stem-cell research grants to be cut. Developers of a biomedical complex near the Johns Hopkins University are scrounging for tenants and rethinking expansion plans.
Much of this is temporary, related to the recession.
But even some of its most passionate boosters acknowledge that, over long years, biotech has not kept its promise. There have been too many dollars poured into the lab and too few effective products coming out.
Biotechnology got off the ground at about the same time Bill Gates founded a tiny company called Microsoft and Apple's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were building computers in a garage. If anything, the ability to map and manipulate DNA seemed to promise bigger dividends than what was going on with microprocessors and data storage.
But if the personal computer industry had bloomed at the same rate as biotech, the first spreadsheet might have come out in 2000, and the Internet would be on track for a 2030 launch.
Aris Melissaratos, who oversees technology commercialization at Hopkins, made a lot of money in the 1980s on products developed by biotech pioneers Genentech and Amgen.
"Those were my first two investments in biotech. I've had about 40 others since. And none has come close" to being as profitable, he said. "My hope was that this decade of 2000 to 2010 would be the decade of biotech. I'm now thinking it's going to be slipping a decade or two. But in the nature of the business, you have to be a patient investor."
