2007 Minnesota Biosciences

As a bellwether of the medical device industry, Minnesota has all the ingredients to befit its reputation, including deep roots that extend back to the founding of Medtronic in 1949. Those early rough and ready devices—devised by Earl Bakken and Palmer Hermundslie from their ramshackle garage in northeast Minneapolis—hit a eureka moment in 1957 with the world’s first wearable, external pacemaker. Since then, medical technology manufacturing has dug its heels in the state, pacing the world in first-to-market innovations such as blood pumps, in-the-ear hearing aids, artificial heart valves, implantable drug transfusion pumps, and anesthesia monitors.

LifeScience Alley (formerly Medical Alley/MNBIO) is Minnesota’s own Fertile Crescent of med-tech companies, with more than 500 FDA-registered members employing more than 250,000 people along an ever-growing 350-mile corridor that stretches from Rochester through the Twin Cities to northern Minnesota and beyond. Its name change in 2006 represented a shift in core focus to include the increasingly symbiotic relationship among medical device manufacturers and the emerging bioscience community.

Over the years, hundreds of start-ups have spawned and clustered around high-profile innovators like Medtronic, St. Jude, Boston Scientific, and 3M. And the state’s rich research bases and universities churn out a highly educated and trained workforce that is lured by a fully developed infrastructure.

“Minneapolis and St. Paul remain magnets for the medical device industry,” says Don Gerhardt, president and CEO of LifeScience Alley in St. Louis Park. “Some up-and-coming areas include Rochester, around the Mayo Clinic, and Saint Cloud, which is 90 miles outside of the city and has tremendous cost advantages.”

Despite Minnesota’s status as a med-tech market leader, the global industry remains as competitive as ever, and the incentive to nurture its talent base and expand its reach is strong. From 1995 to 2005, Minnesota’s employment growth in medical technology industries was 39.4 percent, compared to 4.2 percent nationally. It has a concentration of employment more than three times the nation’s, with ambitious plans in the near future.

In fact, over the next seven years, the state’s major corporations are collectively expected to add another 8,000 to 10,000 industry jobs. Helping grease the wheels is the plan to add more commuter trains and routes along the corridor that should appease potential workers weary of extended commutes from the Twin Cities.

New Tenants

With its much publicized purchases of Minnesota-based Scimed in 1995 and Guidant Corporation in 2006, Natick, Mass.-based Boston Scientific set up office, manufacturing, and R&D space at three Minnesota facilities in Arden Hills, Plymouth, and Maple Grove, employing more than 6,600 employees.

A 110,000 square-foot addition to its Weaver Lake 3 facility in Maple Grove will be operational in January 2008. The facility will add an additional 20,000 feet of lab space and create room for some 650 employees.

“What this building will enable us to do is bring a lot of our folks, who are spread out at our three facilities here, onto one campus to create synergy within the work groups that are involved in moving our product development pipeline forward,” says Hank Kucheman, president of Boston Scientific’s interventional cardiology business.