The University of Pittsburgh will use $292,800 in funding from the Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE) to develop a plan to grow biotech and health care sectors in Southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In collaboration with 14 partners, the project, Biotechnology and Regenerative Medicine Advancement of Appalachian Economy, will create a roadmap for increasing workforce development opportunities, supporting local businesses, and attracting new industries to increase equitable access to high-quality job opportunities in 65 counties.
The University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University (WVU) bring a combined $187,200 in matching funds to this project, which will produce a comprehensive workforce and development plan at the end of the one-year performance period. The program is responding to the needs of what the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) has identified as distressed and at-risk counties.
“The whole notion of personalized medicine has brought us to a point that in the future, the biotech industry will have to be much more customized based on the individual need of the person,” said Chandan Sen, associate vice chancellor for life sciences innovation and commercialization, health sciences, and director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who is leading the project on the Pitt side. “So the future of biotech is very different from the past of biotech, in setting it up, in the principles.”
Ming Lei, senior associate vice president and vice dean for research, WVU School of Medicine, who leads the project on the WVU side, said: “As a land-grant institution, WVU strives to partner with our communities to bring needed and valued solutions to real-life problems within the pillars of education, health care, prosperity and purpose.” He noted that West Virginia is the only state in the nation that is entirely within Appalachia. “Improving the life and well-being of our population is always at the very top of the university’s priorities,” he said.
The grant recipients will conduct a state-wide comprehensive analysis on workforce and skills needs in the health service and biotechnology sectors, identify and mobilize training capacities required for developing the workforce with required skills, and build a community partnership to develop innovative and effective training programs to meet the workforce development needs.
“These training programs will help provide the talent pool to sustain and grow the state’s economic driver, attract new industry such as biotech companies to West Virginia around the university and beyond, and ultimately help transform West Virginia’s natural resource-based economy into a knowledge and technology-based economy,” Lei said.
Sen said that the Pittsburgh region is well-positioned to be a leader in biotechnology and needs a trained workforce.
“There is clearly momentum in the positive direction,” he said. “And because many of these companies are newer, they are trying to position themselves for the future, and they have more freedom to do so, as opposed to companies that are heavily reliant on the current business model.”
How personalized medicine is delivered “and the type of expertise required, and the type of skills required in that sector, will be limiting factors,” Sen explained. “So therefore, our interest in this workforce development program not only accounts for the biotech workforce needed today but also accounts for the training process for the workforce of the future.”
Since January 2023, ARC has awarded $136.3 million to 51 projects impacting all 13 Appalachian states through its ARISE initiative. These multistate projects will expand broadband, educate workers in emerging sectors, and bolster green manufacturing in Appalachia.
“The future is going to be coming at us at an extremely high pace, and this is the time to think and get ready for it. And, therefore, the interest in workforce development, the technologies we build, are critically important,” Sen said. “To take those technologies to the benefit of society and people around us, we need to think about the entire chain, and, in that chain, workforce development.”
Media contact: HSNews@pitt.edu