The Southeastern United States has a dynamic and growing life sciences industry. There are currently 30 public companies and more than 200 private biotech companies in the Southeast. Three Southeastern states – North Carolina, Georgia and Florida – are among the top ten U.S. biotech centers, according to Ernst & Young’s Beyond Borders: The Global Biotechnology Report 2006. North Carolina is in third place behind California and Massachusetts. Georgia improved its ranking from 2004, climbing from number 8 to number 7, while Florida entered the top ten list for the first time at number 10. To read a fact sheet on the Southeast's biotech industry, click here.

The growth of the biotech industry in the Southeast remains strong, as further evident from the 2006 Ernst & Young report, which shows:

• Total revenues for the Southeast's 30 public companies in 2005 were $1.9 billion.
• Market capitalization for these companies was $8.9 billion.
• Public biotech companies in the Southeast invested $659 million in R&D, a 20 percent increase over 2004.

There were approximately 204 deals in the Southeast region in 2005, the third largest number of deals among similar regions across the United States, according to The MoneyTree™ Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data from Thomson Financial.

The Southeast has more life sciences communities than any other region. North Carolina, with its Research Triangle Park centered between three world-class universities, is home to 88 biotech companies and 100 biotech-related companies, and is the leading center in the Southeast for biotechnology. Other biotechnology centers have clustered around universities: in particular at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where the primary focus is agriculture and veterinary; the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where the focus is on AIDS and cancer research; Georgia, at the private Emory University, where primary research is on AIDS, cancer and infectious diseases in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control; Tennessee, at the private Vanderbilt University, which looks at areas of human health, while the University of Tennessee at Knoxville/Oak Ridge looks at environmental technologies; North Carolina, where Duke, a private institution, looks at most areas of human health, while North Carolina State University focuses on agriculture and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looks at environment biotechnologies; and finally, South Carolina is placing new emphasis on research with a significant increase in research dollars going to its three major research universities, Clemson University, the University of South Carolina, and the Medical University of South Carolina, while Charleston is home to a growing bioscience cluster strengthened by the presence of the Medical University.