On forefront of bioscience job growth
Branford’s IsoPlexis plans to double its workforce in a key industry for state’s economic expansion
BRANFORD — Nine years ago, a half-dozen professors at Yale and other universities envisioned a life sciences system that would aid researchers and drugmakers in evaluating how patients would respond to a treatment by pulling more information from individual cells.
Today, the idea has grown into Branford-based IsoPlexis Corp, a medical technology company that has expanded from about 40 employees in 2017 to 250, about 150 in Connecticut — with plans to double its workforce in the next few years. Thecompany’s customers include some of the leading pharmaceutical companies, including, Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck & Co. and Genentech Inc.
After declining for two decades, jobs in bioscience are showing signs of a comeback for an industry economic development officials hope will play an important role in the state’s future. IsoPlexis, whose primary focus is on cancer but also infectious
diseases including COVID19, is part of an ecosystem of bioscience companies in Connecticut that now number over 1,000.
“When we started the company, we had, obviously, just very few people — a couple of professors helping, but that has evolved significantly,” Sean Mackay, co-founder and chief executive of IsoPlexis, said.
While still s mall compared with other Connecticut employment sectors such as defense and aerospace, bioscience is getting some national notice.
IsoPlexis and Guilford-based MRI maker Hyperfine Research grabbed spots this year’s “Fierce 15” list by trade publication Fierce MedTech. The trade publication, widely followed in the industry, says it evaluates hundreds of companies compiling its list, looking for “big, breakthrough ideas that can move the needle and make a significant impact on patients’ lives.”
The list included some of the largest bioscience markets, including four in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay area.
Hyperfine, founded in 2014 by Yale scientist and entrepreneurial superstar Jonathan Rothberg, developed a portable MRI scanner that can be wheeled to a patient’s bedside for head and brain scans, which could prove advantageous for use in intensive care units.
Rothberg’s Quantum-Si, which uses semiconductor chips to “decode” proteins, recently announced plans to go public later this year via a merger. The merger with HighCape Capital Acquisition Corp. values the combined company at $1.46 billion.
Good salaries and more companies, but fewer jobs
The bioscience industry in Connecticut has seen declining employment for the past two decades, driven largely among manufacturers in the sector, following general trends of job losses in manufacturing overall, according to the state Department of Labor.
According to the labor department, employment fell by26% between 2001 and 2017, to 21,689. But in 2018 and 2019 — the last twoyears for which data is available — the trend started to reverse, and it isn’t yet known what effect COVID-19 hadin2020.
As employment declined, however, the number of bioscience companies in Connecticut kept climbing, reaching 1,021 in 2019, the labor department said. Average annual pay also rose from $75,990 in 2001 to $121,308 in 2019, a nearly 60% increase.
The bioscience industry may be starting to carve out significant space and turning toward an upward job trajectory for university scientists and engineers and then, as the companies evolve and grow, all the jobs needed to run a business: sales, marketing and accounting. The sector also has the potential to create an increasing number of sought-after, high-paying jobs.
“You keep attracting more and more quality people,” Dan Wagner, senior managing director at Connecticut Innovations, a quasi-public state agency that invests in early-stage companies.
The state has been encouraging these high-tech entrepreneurial endeavors with investments by CI and InvestCT, which provides funding for Connecticut start-ups and small businesses through privately-managed venture capital funds.
CI has invested $7.5 million in IsoPlexis, which is now transitioning from a technology company to one focused on selling its instruments, software and providing service for what it sells. IsoPlexis has sales offices on the West Coast and in Europe and Asia and said it has sold about 120 of its instruments around the world, at an average cost of $200,000 each.
In one of the state’s biggest overtures to bioscience, Connecticut spent nearly $300 million to lure Jackson Laboratory to the UConn Health campus 10 years ago with the promise to create 300 jobs and re-ignite the industry here.
IsoPlexis also drew early financing from InvestCT through one of its venture capital funds, Advantage Capital Partners, of $2.1 million.
Ryan Brennan, managing director of Advantage Capital, said its investment in IsoPlexis provided a springboard for raising capital from a series of large, private investors. Earlier this year, one of those — at $135 million — was IsoPlexis’s largest.
IsoPlexis’s systems were used in a study sponsored by Merck aimed at trying to determine how drugs might be used on patients prone for a severe cases of COVID19 to keep them out of intensive care units and increase chances of survival, Mackay said.
The company has quadrupled its space in Branford since 2017, now occupying 40,000 square feet.
For the near future, at least, Mackay said he expects IsoPlexis will be used in conjunction with research for new drug treatments. But the devices could one day be used in individual patient cases, he said.
“There are all sorts of approvals and processes to get there, but there’s a pathway and we have shown pathways that it could be used in that context,” Mackay said.