Fast Facts
- One-quarter (26 percent) of biotechnology companies in New England have at least one foreign-born founder.
- These immigrant-founded biotechnology companies produced more than $7.6 billion in sales and employed more than 4,000 workers in 2006 alone.
- Biotechnology firms with an immigrant founder typically specialize in the most complex, risky, life science-intensive research directly applicable to human health (human therapeutics and genomics/proteomics). In fact, two-thirds pursued knowledge related to therapies for human health. Less than half of other Massachusetts biotechnology firms claim human therapeutics as their main pursuit.
- Immigrant entrepreneurs in New England’s biotechnology sector hail from 23 different countries with only 28 percent of them coming from native English-speaking countries.
