AURORA | The Aurora-Denver area saw impressive job growth in bioscience and health care as well as most other sectors among the eight biggest industries last year, according to a report from the Metro Denver Economic Development Council.
The group’s annual Industry Cluster Study, released this month, said the state has largely erased job losses suffered during the recession.
And the state’s bioscience and health care industries — which are largely centered at the Anschutz Medical Campus and adjacent Fitzsimons Life Science District — both saw job growth last year, according to the report.
The report looks at eight major industries around metro Denver and northern Colorado: aerospace, aviation, bioscience, broadcasting and telecommunications, energy, financial services, health care and wellness, and information technology-software.
Two years after the report showed seven of the eight industry clusters having suffered job losses in the previous years, the 2012 report showed the opposite: seven of the eight saw job growth.
“The stars are starting to align for our region,” the report’s author, Metro Denver EDC’s Chief Economist Patty Silverstein said in a statement announcing the findings.
The report broke down the state’s bioscience cluster into two subcategories, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, and medical devices and diagnostics.
In the medical devices and diagnostics category, the report said the state’s 330 companies employed more than 10,000 people last year making an average annual salary of $72,000. The industry grew by 3 percent last year and 15 percent from 2007 to 2012. That outpaced the industry’s national five-year growth rate, which was just 4.8 percent.
In pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, 4,710 companies employed 270 people making about $99,000 annually. The industry grew by 1.2 percent last year, bucking a five-year trend that saw it decrease by 11 percent.
In discussing the state’s bioscience industry, the report singled out Anschutz and Fitzsimons as places where collaboration can help spark the industry.
“The region’s research universities and numerous innovation assets support the industry, as well as opportunities to bring together academic, research, and bioscience companies at the 578-acre Fitzsimons Life Science District and the adjacent Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora,” the report said.
The biggest industry studied by Metro Denver EDC was healthcare and wellness, which employed 176,000 people across 18,000 companies. Those employees made an average salary of $51,000. The industry grew 3 percent last year and 22 percent over five years. Nationally it grew by 9 percent.
Tom Clark, CEO of the Metro Denver EDC, said the state’s economy will continue to grow in part because of two recent developments: the first is a daily non-stop flight from Denver to Tokyo set to start next month the second is the announcement last year that the United States Patent and Trade Office would open a Denver facility in the coming years.
Clark called those developments “game changers game changers’ of which national site consultants and companies in expansion mode are definitely taking notice.”