Cities in four states collaborating to build biologics industry
Imagine a collaboration involving cities in four states and focused on a highly technical area like biologics.
Well, that’s what will be underway next month when teams from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and its “Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program“ (REAP) began their work with the “Heartland Civic Collaborative.” The latter is an organization representing Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines and Omaha.
According to this recent TV news post, those involved in the ewffort say creating one unified voice for the four cities allows the region to work together to build momentum and strategize in shared goals for the four-state area of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. One of those goals is to expand the life sciences industry, which includes biologics.
“It (biologics) is the future of personalized medicine. It’s an access point to be able to feed the world, to create ecological-friendly materials and so much more,” said Sonia Hall, President and Chief Executive Officer of BioKansas, an organization that promotes and advocates for biologics in Kansas and the Kansas City metropolitan area.
Hall said over the next two years, MIT’s REAP team will help the region adapt to fit MIT’s proven model of innovation-driven entrepreneurship. MIT has used the program around the world to supercharge entrepreneurship and ultimately improve economies.
