When the board of the Prince Edward Island BioAlliance met last month for its first strategy session in three years, it didn’t exactly have to rip up its old plans and start afresh.

No, a better term for the BioAlliance’s task would be “fine tuning”. The BioAlliance knows that in six years it has established a successful model, with a gaggle of bioscience companies and organizations employing almost 1,000 people, and the private sector segment growing strongly. The partners in the alliance are in no hurry to fix what isn’t broken, so they are building on success with a few new or enhanced initiatives.

“This is all about building credibility,” said Executive Director Rory Francis in an interview in his Charlottetown office. “You build credibility and you attract IP and then you attract capital and then you attract people.”

The bioscience community began the BioAlliance in 2005, shortly after the National Research Council’s Institute for Nutrisciences and Health set up in Charlottetown. Given its history in food production and the strengths of the University of PEI, biosciences were an obvious sector on which PEI should concentrate, and the BioAlliance served as a guiding force for its growth. Francis, a former deputy minister in the PEI government, says his group is not a trade association so much as a “fourth pillar”, working with industry, academia and government to develop the cluster.

Over the years it has made a few key decisions that have contributed to the growth of the industry. For example, human drug development can be incredibly lucrative, but it is also fraught with risk and multi-year regulatory processes. So the BioAlliance and its partners have instead encouraged entrepreneurs and researchers to focus more on personal healthcare products and fish and animal health. Its biennial VetHealth Global conference is one of the world’s leading gatherings for animal health and has drawn the CEOs of Pfizer Animal Health, Novartis Animal Health and other big hitters.

The results have been impressive, especially in private sector growth. In 2010, the companies in the BioAlliance sphere recorded $95 million in revenue, a gain of 100 percent over five years. The number of jobs in the sector has almost doubled as well, with just under 575 people at work in the private sector and 400 in the public sector, including research.

Statistics on research and development take years to confirm, but Francis believes there is now about $75 million in research and development ($20 million to $22 million of it in the private sector), up from a confirmed $68 million in 2008. 

“The important thing is the trajectory and the trajectory in the private sector is higher than in any other segment,” said Francis. The growth has included the development of a host of successful companies headquartered on the Island, including Island Abbey Foods, BioVectra and Neurodyn.

So how do the BioAlliance partners improve on this success?

The first step is to focus on attracting private capital and to expose the entrepreneurs to sources of that capital. The BioAlliance has a tradition of “In-Missions” in which it flies leaders in a field to PEI to meet people, rather than flying a lot of Islanders around the world, and in the next little while it wants to fly in more venture capital managers.

There are also a range of projects from screening companies to working with the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco to connect with potential investors, to a commercial services initiative that will help to incubate companies by analyzing and improving business plans. The body is also developing a regulatory strategy, to help companies in the field understand and plan for the often treacherous job of gaining regulatory approval.

All of these efforts will complement the development of the new $30 million, 60,000-square-foot BioCommons, the first phase of which is due to be completed this year. It is expected to host 500 employees in five years.

That private sector trajectory Francis mentions looks like it will continue to be quite steep.