Seattle has long been known as a tech hub – but now, it’s poised for a life science boom. With lab space increasingly hard to find within the city, real estate development companies are swooping in to change that. In the South Lake Union neighborhood in particular, a multitude of life science building projects will come to fruition over the next few years and join the ranks of nearby industry heavyweights including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. These developments will help to advance Seattle’s already robust pipeline of newly formed biotech companies.
Seattle’s access to top tech talent has also propelled its life science industry forward. Life Science Washington’s Marc Cummings commented: “We’re trying to be the center of a convergence of biotech, life science and digital computing. Having that pool of talent that has computational capacity to apply that to computational biology, that’s one of the big trends in the field these days.”