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42 Doing Business in Connecticut | 2017 and biopharma executives to Connecticut, some of whom eventually launched their own start-ups. Pfizer Inc., which once had a major re- search presence on the shoreline, has sharply curtailed its footprint there. Meantime, German drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim continues to grow its U.S. research operations — and staffing — in Ridgefield. What Connecticut lacked then but boasts today, is the critical mass' of scientific and entrepreneurial talent, plus a notable track re- cord of public and private funding to further grow and sustain its bioscience ambitions. "at's where those seeds were being planted and developed,'' said David Wurzer, a former CuraGen officer who is chief invest- ment officer at Connecticut Innovations, the state's quasi-public technology promotions and investment arm. "All of those seeds gave rise to a critical mass of bioscience companies that were able to attract scientific talent from around the country.'' Golden period Hartford serial bio-entrepreneur Dr. Gualberto Ruano, who co-founded Genais- sance Pharmaceuticals in New Haven, now part of a larger bioscience company, describes the period from the late 80s until the bursting of the "tech-investment bubble'' in 2001 as "a golden period.'' "ose were the days when the internet broke ground as an industry,'' Ruano said, "and genomics was riding the coattail of the internet boom.'' Kevin Rakin, a co-founder of Genais- sance, which raised $60 million in 2000 as one of Connecticut's first bioscience initial public offerings, credits Ruano as "one of the first people in the world to articulate the idea of personalized medicine. He sketched it out for me on the back of a napkin at a New Haven pizza parlor." During that period, many bioscience start-ups in Connecticut and around the country were eager to harness work done to map the entire human genome as a door- way into genetic-based treatment of disease. However, funding dried up in the wake of the dot-com crash in 2001. at prompted a global search among bioscience compa- nies for molecular compounds that could be licensed for development into drugs as a way of generating revenue and profits to appease skeptical investors. e companies that had successes in drug development, like Alexion, Achillion and Rib-X, are still independent. Others, like Genaissance, Neurogen and Vion, either no longer exist or lost their independence. Cura- Gen was sold in 2009 for $95 million to New Jersey's Celldex erapeutics. Despite the lack of a formal support in- frastructure, people in and around the state's nascent bioscience sector were open then to new ideas, many of them bandied between researchers/executives at the seven, said Rakin, who for a time was Genaissance's CEO. Genaissance merged with Clinical Data Inc., of Newton, Mass., in 2005. "We had a wild ride,'' said Rakin. "We felt like we could do anything.'' Budding industry To get a sense of where Connecticut's bioscience industry emerged and how far it's come, it's helpful to understand the economic climate at that time. e U.S. economy was tracking favorably in the late 80s, and then in 1992, Congress enacted legislation empowering colleges and universities to leverage their research, patents and other intellectual property into busi- ness ventures. In Connecticut, Yale University, which had medical and technology professors who for years had pursued solo commercializa- tion of their research, quickly seized on the opportunity to coordinate and facilitate those start-up efforts. All seven Connecticut bioscience start- ups can trace their roots directly or indirectly to Yale. In the last 20 years, the university has launched some 60 biotechnology companies that have raised more than $1 billion in pro- fessional venture capital, said Jon Soderstrom, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, whose headquarters is pictured, is one of the original "seven sisters" in the state's biopharma industry. > Continued from page 37 'All of those seeds gave rise to a critical mass of bioscience companies that were able to attract scientific talent from around the country. ' — Dave Wurzer, chief investment officer, connecticut innovations PHOTO/ALEXION INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT › Health & BioPharma