Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is at the center of the biopharmaceutical corridor of the northeastern US and is the leading US state in pharmaceutical manufacturing and in terms of the number of workforce employed by the sector. In fact, the sector consists of hundreds of biopharmaceutical companies and more than 2,000 life sciences companies, in addition to several medical schools and hospitals. The presence of these facilities and several of America’s top universities has made Philadelphia in particular, and Pennsylvania in general, an extremely attractive location for biotech companies, which have benefited from the region’s close proximity to pharmaceutical companies. The main investments have recently been made in the field of gene and cell therapy, so much so that the State proposes itself, within the US and world panorama, as Cellicon Valley.

Another particularly developed sector in the State is also the food one. The food industry is one of the main economic drivers in Pennsylvania: it supplies quality products, from production to the final consumer, occupying a strategic position and offering an excellent product delivery service. With exports valued at nearly $2 billion in 2016, food manufacturing is one of the fastest growing industries in the country, occupying more than 10 percent of both the workforce and economic impact in Pennsylvania. National and international companies have exploited the opportunities offered by the food sector, such as Hershey Foods Corporation, Knouse Foods Cooperative, Ahold (Netherlands), Charles & Alice (France), Food Lion (Belgium), Gruma Corp. (Mexico), Keystone Foods (Brazil), Kraft Foods Inc. (Switzerland), Nissin Foods (Japan).

The pharmaceutical and food sectors represent two priority strategic areas for Emilia-Romagna: the first one relevance is due to the highly innovative performance of the companies that are part of it and the level of research skills it expresses; the second one significance is due to the importance of the sector in terms of number of businesses, employment, production value and exports compared to the regional economy as a whole, as well as the propensity for innovation that the entire supply chain expresses, also thanks to an excellent university and research system at national and European level. Initiatives such as the World Food Research and Innovation Forum well represent the integration of the of research and industry worlds, as well as the systemic actions (which include the various regional universities with the entrepreneurial excellence of the area) in the field of higher education that constitute a solid reference for developing a high-level dialogue and future collaboration with American interlocutors in the area.