Prince Edward Island’s life sciences segment has been doubling in size about every four years, and now the industry’s association has a singular mission: keep it going.

The Prince Edward Island BioAlliance recently released its latest strategy statement, which outlines targets that would effectively continue to double revenues among its private sector members by 2020. It also wants to continue strong growth in employment, investment and research and development spending.

“We’ve doubled revenues … from less than $100 million to more than $200 million in 2015,” executive director Rory Francis said in an interview in his Charlottetown office last week. “We expect to double it again by 2020, so we’ll be up to about $400 million.

The BioAlliance, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, is a private sector-led organization that brings together businesses, academia, government and non-governmental organizations to grow life sciences companies in P.E.I., whether they’re in biotech, agritech or other areas. The group now includes 46 private companies, 15 of which have joined the group since 2010.

The BioAlliance companies generated about $218 million of revenue in 2015, up from $95 million in 2010. The public- and private-sector members of the BioAlliance employed 1,400 people as of the end of 2015, up from about 900 in 2010.

Aiding this growth, the federal government has twice in the past two years awarded P.E.I. funding for major new initiatives: $3.6 million for the Emergence bioscience incubator; and $14 million to head the nationwide group, Natural Products Canada.

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Now the group is preparing to carry on this growth. As well as the targets for revenue growth, the recent strategy report sets out several other milestones for four years from now:

Bio-sector employment of about 2,000, up from the 2015 level of about 1,400.

Research and development expenditures (led by the private sector) up to $100 million a year, from just more than $70 million in 2013.

Follow-on private investment of $100 million over a five-year period for BioAlliance companies.

There was about $14 million of such investment in 2015, and Francis said the annual level is at about $20 million in 2016.

To accommodate this growth, BioAlliance is spearheading an effort to develop a new $30 million to $35 million BioAccelerator complex.

The group hopes to build the 77,000-square- foot facility at the BioCommons Research Park in the Charlottetown area. It envisions a multi-faceted space that would include offices, co-working space, wet labs and manufacturing facilities that would be open by 2019.

The BioAlliance is now lobbying all levels of government to contribute to the new facility, and Francis said the response has been favorable, largely because the proponents can show bioscience investments have produced a return for P.E.I. Such a facility is needed, he said, to accommodate the galloping growth of the biotech sector on the island.

“We’re just trying to keep up with what the companies are doing,” he said. “We think that by 2025 we’ll be over $600 million in sales, but we can’t do that unless we get some space to grow.”