Besides a short commute, affordable housing and other quality-of-life factors, Bioanalytical Systems Chairman and CEO Dr. Peter Kissinger says their West Lafayette, Ind., location is at the ideal center of his company's client base.

The Bicycle Factor

"We have a world class, globally reputable university with extremely high strength in chemistry, especially analytical chemistry, a school of pharmacy, veterinary medicine, biomedical engineering and computer science," says Dr. Peter Kissinger of Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind. Kissinger is chairman and CEO of Bioanalytical Systems (BAS), a drug development firm, manufacturer of specialized instrumentation for a variety of scientific disciplines and provider of contract laboratory services. BAS's headquarters is located in the Purdue Research Park, operated by the Purdue Research Foundation.
        Kissinger also stresses the importance of quality-of-life attributes, including affordable housing, cultural amenities, strong schools and short commutes. "When traffic is really tough, my commute is seven minutes," he says. "When traffic is light, it's six minutes. I can ride a bicycle in 20 minutes. I can't do that in Los Angeles or Palo Alto."

Purdue Research Park is just one of many university-related R&D campuses dotting the U.S. biotech landscape.

        Locations such as West Lafayette, and the entire Indianapolis Life Sciences Corridor for that matter, gain strategic value when viewed on a more macro level. "We are at the center of a fabulous life science community," says Kissinger, "with St. Louis to the west, Cincinnati to the east, Kalamazoo, Mich., Chicago, Indianapolis, Ann Arbor, Mich., -- we are right in the middle. Our clients are companies like Anheuser-Busch and Pharmacia and two large R&D centers in St. Louis. We have Pharmacia in Chicago, Abbot in Chicago. We have Pharmacia in Kalamazoo, Pfizer in Ann Arbor. We have Procter & Gamble pharmaceuticals and consumer products north of Cincinnati. And in Indiana we have Lilly in Indianapolis and Greenfield, we have Bristol Myers Squibb in Evansville and Bayer in Elkhart."
        There are three major centers of life science capitalism in the United States, Kissinger maintains. "There is California on the discovery side, the Boston to Research Triangle on the East Cast side, and where we are here." The difference between BAS and its collaborators and clients in the Midwest and other biotech clusters is geographic proximity. Similar dynamics are at work in New Jersey, for instance, but the other cluster participants are towns away, not states away. "Our weakness is that the distances here are a lot greater than in New Jersey, where a scientist can move from pharmaceutical company to pharmaceutical company without having to sell his house," Kissinger points out.