Florida is winning the biotech race. Here’s how to finish the job.

When I sold Boca Biolistics to a Canadian private equity firm in 2023, I assumed our next decade of growth would take place elsewhere.

Florida had given us our start, but conventional wisdom held that life sciences companies graduated to Boston or San Diego once they reached scale.

Three years later, the conventional wisdom is collapsing.

BioFlorida now represents nearly 100,000 jobs across 8,600 establishments. The Miami Biotech Collective, launched in 2025, has attracted close to 500 executives and investors to South Florida. Catalyst Pharmaceuticals just cleared $500 million in annual revenue, all from a Coral Gables headquarters. OpenEvidence chose Miami. RatioTherapeutics is building alpha-emitter manufacturing on the Sylvester Cancer Center campus. Citadel is constructing a 54-story global headquarters in Brickell because the talent is following the capital here.

The momentum is real. The structural shift away from Boston and San Diego is permanent. But the policy infrastructure underpinning Florida’s biotech rise has not yet caught up with the economic transformation, and the gap between the two is where the next decade will be won or lost.

As someone who built a CRO, biobank and reference laboratory here from the ground up, I see where Florida is losing deals it should be winning.

Companies relocate because clinical laboratory workforce pipelines fail to deliver sufficient qualified personnel. Regulatory friction across the Department of Health, AHCA and the Department of Business and Professional Regulation adds friction without adding safety. Scale-up phase capital — the Series B through commercial-stage gap — pulls Florida-built companies to states with purpose-built financing instruments we have not yet matched.

There is no mystery about what would close the gap.

Reform of the Board of Clinical Laboratory Personnel framework, expanded apprenticeship and credentialing programs at our state universities and state colleges, and direct partnerships with industry employers would expand the talent pool that biotech companies actually need.

A coordinated interagency review of FDOH, AHCA and DBPR processes for CROs, reference laboratories and biospecimen operators would meaningfully accelerate sector growth.

Reinvigorating the James and Esther King Biomedical Research Program, alongside operator-led commercialization partnerships at Scripps Florida, Max Planck Florida Institute, UF Scripps and Sylvester Cancer Center, would multiply the return on existing state investment.

State-backed bridge financing, targeted tax credits and pension-fund co-investment vehicles for life sciences could plug the scale-up capital gap.

None of these are unfixable problems. None of them fix themselves either.

Florida already has the climate, the capital, the talent migration from Massachusetts and California, and the political will to lead the next decade of biotech growth. What is still missing is the operator perspective at the table when policy is actually shaped — on the Board of Clinical Laboratory Personnel, on the James and Esther King Biomedical Research Program Council, and on the adjacent advisory bodies where the state’s biotech strategy is written.

The policy framework needs the same input that built the companies in the first place.

The economic transformation is already underway. The question is whether we build the infrastructure to match it — deliberately, while we still have the lead — or whether we let the moment pass.

___

Joseph Mauro is the founder of The Mauro Group, LLC, a Palm Beach County advisory firm, and of Boca Biolistics, a clinical research organization and biospecimen company that he sold to Clairvest Group in 2023.