Working with the Flinn Foundation, SRI’s Center for Innovation Strategy and Policy created a Bioscience Roadmap that will guide Arizona’s ongoing transformation into a national bioscience hub.
The bioscience industry is a critical element of innovation-driven economies. From Boston to Abu Dhabi to Beijing, collaborations among industry, government, and academia are advancing science into breakthrough technologies that generate high-skilled jobs and improve health outcomes.
To cultivate this growth industry and ensure that innovation delivers real-world impact, the Arizona-based Flinn Foundation commissioned the Arizona Bioscience Roadmap, a statewide strategic plan, in 2002. The Flinn Foundation has supported its implementation ever since. But much has changed since the original Roadmap was released and later renewed in 2014. Machine learning brought radical changes to drug discovery, wearables and digital healthcare have reshaped the patient experience, global competition is becoming fierce, and recent shifts in both private investment and federal funding priorities are bringing new uncertainties.
“We helped Arizona not only assess the state of its bioscience ecosystem, but also chart a bold, future-ready strategy for the state to solidify its position as a national bioscience leader.” — Christiana McFarland
Amid these opportunities and disruptions, the Flinn Foundation asked SRI to deliver the Arizona Bioscience Roadmap 2025–2030. The new roadmap comprehensively refreshes the state’s strategy in light of new technologies, funding trends, and Arizona’s tremendous growth.
“We helped Arizona not only assess the state of its bioscience ecosystem, but also chart a bold, future-ready strategy for the state to solidify its position as a national bioscience leader,” says Christina McFarland, executive director of SRI’s Center for Innovation Strategy and Policy (CISP), which works with organizations, regions, and countries to accelerate the long-term economic and social impact of investments in science, technology, and a skilled workforce.
Building on a strong foundation of bioscience innovation
Arizona is no newcomer to bioscience innovation. The industry employs more than 144,000 people across the state in sectors that include medical devices, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and industrial biosciences, and medical labs. Prominent universities are graduating a steady stream of talent, with the University of Arizona focused on biomedicine, Arizona State University on bioengineering and computing, and Northern Arizona University on pathogen genomics and community-engaged research. While much of the activity is concentrated in and around Phoenix, regional efforts like Moonshot Arizona in Flagstaff, the Critical Path Institute’s Translational Therapeutics Accelerator in Tucson, the Yuma Center for Excellence in Desert Agriculture, and more speak to the diversity of the state’s bioscience footprint.
The state’s talent pipeline is translating into commercial success: Bioscience startups in the state raised $1.1 billion in venture capital between 2019 and 2023, and the growth of bioscience jobs in the state has far outpaced other industries.
To maintain momentum, the new roadmap focuses on identifying remaining challenges like commercialization bottlenecks, workforce gaps, and capital access. It also identifies actionable strategies to link research to real-world impact, better align education with industry, and integrate bioscience with adjacent sectors like AI, semiconductors, and defense.
“The uncertainty across the global bioscience industry is acute,” says Dylan Solden, a project leader at CISP who led SRI’s work on the project. “We wanted to put Arizona in the best possible position to navigate the next five years.”
Identifying the path forward
To gain a 360-degree view of the current state of bioscience innovation in Arizona, the SRI team undertook a comprehensive innovation ecosystem assessment, analyzed emerging innovation indicators (such as publications, patents, trademarks, and startup formation), incorporated data-driven workforce and talent analysis, and benchmarked the state’s accomplishments against comparable peer ecosystems.
The team also collected extensive feedback through hundreds of interviews, focus groups, and surveys across the state to ensure that the Roadmap not only addressed data-identified gaps but also reflected the lived realities and priorities of Arizona’s bioscience community. This input formed the strategic framing for the Roadmap.
One clear advantage that SRI brought to the table, Solden points out, is that the CISP team was able to collaborate with colleagues in SRI’s Bioscience division and get a real-time sense of how practicing bioscience innovators are creating new opportunities. “One of the things our bioscience colleagues emphasized was the importance of creating ‘plug-and-play’ models,” Solden comments. “Researchers doing innovative work need to have ready access to commercialization networks; if they don’t, promising research might never make it out of the lab.” To that end, the report’s recommendations include establishing a statewide portal to access university IP and creating an Arizona Bioscience Commercialization Network that would support bioscience researchers and entrepreneurs across the state.
Some of the report’s other recommendations include building a statewide bioscience incubator network aligned to regional specializations and needs; diversifying the investment base; establishing a bioscience talent concierge to recruit and retain catalytic research, clinical, entrepreneurial, and business talent; and creating a coordinated communications plan to showcase Arizona’s bioscience activity.
The future of bioscience in Arizona
While the full impact of the Roadmap may not be clear until 2030 and beyond, the SRI team is confident that it equips Arizona to sustain momentum by both safeguarding the state’s current bioscience assets and further extending progress, positioning the ecosystem to seize opportunities in an increasingly competitive race for bioscience leadership.
“What gives me the most confidence in this roadmap is hearing from people across the ecosystem — researchers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers alike — that they see their own role reflected in it,” McFarland says. “That kind of alignment builds shared ownership and creates the momentum needed to strengthen Arizona’s bioscience future.”
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