City Plots How To Grow Neuro Economy

The economic impact of Yale New Haven Hospital’s planned new $838 million neuroscience center should extend well beyond the realm of the biosciences — potentially opening up new opportunities in New Haven for clinical care providers and digital marketing specialists and data scientists and laundromat operators.

That’s one of the key conclusions from a city-hired consultant who just finished a deep dive into New Haven’s existing neuroscience market on the cusp of transformation.

Kevin Hively of Ninigret Partners gave that presentation Wednesday morning during the latest regular monthly Development Commission meeting on the second floor of City Hall.

City Acting Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli said the city had hired Hively to research and provide a comprehensive overview of the national neuroscience industry — both in regards to which local players are currently involved in that field as well as which parts of the city’s economy are best positioned to grow after YNHH completes its new neuroscience center and St. Raphael hospital campus expansion.

“Neurological diseases afflict more than one billion people worldwide,” said Piscitelli (pictured). The number of people afflicted with such diseases in the United States alone is expected to roughly double from 44 million to 84 million by 2050.

The hospital’s decision to build out this neuroscience research and treatment center in New Haven could have an enormous impact on the city’s economy — and not just for jobs directly related to the care provided at the center itself, but to a number of surrounding fields, ranging from behavioral and cognition to retail and hospitality.

Click here to download a PDF copy of Hively’s presentation to the commission.

“New Haven Is Connecticut’s Neuroscience Play”

Hively said that New Haven has a national, even global, imprint in the broader neuroscience world in large part thanks to Yale University and YNHH. He said that Yale has received more ​“prime awards” from the National Institute of Health for neuroscience research and care than have 37 other states.

And because of the aging demographics of this country and the increasing instances of neurological diseases ranging from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s to depression, Hively said, the NIH is only plowing more and more grant money into the field.

“For a very long time, cancer was the largest single expenditure out of the NIH,” he said. ​“Now it’s neuroscience,” representing 26 percent of all money spent by the NIH.

That should be a boon for New Haven, he said. ​“New Haven is Connecticut’s neuroscience play.”

It’s where the NIH spends nearly all of its research dollars in the state. It has the only nationally ranked neuroscience program in the state, as well as a near monopoly on all graduate degrees in the neurosciences.

And, since Pfizer broke up its Groton campus in 2018 and dispersed many of its researchers to other areas of the state and country, New Haven is now the ​“top research center in the state” as well.

Hively said the neuroscience economy stretches across several different fields of work, including the biology-focused care, pharmaceutical development, artificial intelligence, data science, and behavioral and cognition. He said those latter terms apply to consumer-facing technology that leverages the insights of how the brain works biologically to understand and influence actual behavior.

“Nielsen has this behavioral science institute,” Hively said, citing the global media market research company.

“It’s the largest holder of brain reading patents in the United States.” Not because that company is working on a cure for Alzheimer’s. But because it wants to understand how people process what they’re watching on television and what they’re listening to on the radio.

New Haven already has a number of players working in various neuroscience fields, he said.

In research, those include the Yale Neuroscience Institute, the Yale Center for Customer Insights, the John B. Pierce Labs, and Southern Connecticut State University.

On the clinical side, they include YNHH and the Connecticut Mental Health Center.

And in the therapeutics and pharmaceutical development realms, there’s Alexion, Arvinas, Alva Health, ReNetX, BioXcel Therapeutics, BioHaven Pharmaceuticals, and Trevi Therapeutics.

Hively recommended that the city support the construction of new lab space to accommodate new companies interested in working in neuroscience in the Elm City. He said most of the companies and institutions working in this field have cropped up around the Rt. 34 corridor.

The city should do all it can to allow for easy connectivity — by foot and bike and car and public transit — between Union Station and the new neuroscience center planned for Sherman Avenue.

And the city should work with private-sector partners to promote New Haven as a regional and national hotspot for neuroscience-related work.

What About ​“Inclusive Growth”?

After Hively finished his presentation, Development Commissioner Miguel Pittman (pictured) jumped in with a point he thought Hively’s detailed presentation was missing.

“I don’t see an inclusive growth component within your presentation,” he said. How does the existing community of the West River and Hill and Dwight neighborhoods benefit from this expected growth in the various neuroscience-related fields discussed so far?

Hively said that his presentation was focused primarily on identifying what the industry looks like today — to provide a foundation of knowledge on top of which the city can build a more comprehensive marketing and job training set of plans.

Nevertheless, Hively pointed out, ​“the clinical component is where most of the jobs are” in the neuroscience field. That means nursing jobs, home healthcare jobs, social work jobs, and data science jobs. Those latter jobs don’t require college or graduate-level degrees, he said. All that require are strong math skills.

The city should also keep track of how the first-floor spaces at new clinical and pharmaceutical and research buildings are used he said. Those spaces can be filled by coffee shops, laundromats, and other retail and community services necessary for the basic functioning of a neighborhood.

Piscitelli (pictured) added that Hively’s presentation shined a lot on the importance of the city working with schools like SCSU not just to sustain the existing bioscience path, which encourages New Haven Promise students to get a degree in bioscience and land a job in pharmaceutical research and development.

“One thing we haven’t done is bringing in the other disciplines, such as marketing, clinicians, nursing,” he said. ​“We haven’t really talked to the nursing school. We’ve talked to the bioscience team.”

He said the city’s next steps now that Hively’s research is complete involve weaving these insights into the a comprehensive marketing program and ​“sector strategy” for how to go about attracting new neurosciences businesses to New Haven, and how to grow those businesses with local talent.