Move to Silicon Valley. Biotech entrepreneur Michael Triplett is quietly positioning Ohio to be the next epicenter of biotech innovation and life sciences.
A pioneer in gene therapy, Triplett founded Myonexus Therapeutics, one of Ohio’s most successful biotech startups, which was acquired in 2019 in a deal valued at more than $225 million.
He has emerged as one of the state’s leading proponents of turning the state capital, Columbus, into a biotech hub, telling everyone that the next wave of medical advances will come from the heart of the Midwest, not from coastal elites.
“Innovation follows people and purpose, not zip code,” Triplett said. “I am motivated to drive innovation to build on our state’s economic recovery, and there are many like-minded people who are partnering with me.”
That motivation was rooted in his childhood.
When Triplett was a boy living in rural Ohio in the 1980s and 1990s, he witnessed the devastation of factories closing and thousands of blue-collar workers losing their jobs.
His hometown of East Liverpool, located along the Ohio River where the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia borders meet, was once a thriving pottery center. The population has declined from a peak of about 25,000 in the 1970s to less than 10,000 today.
The downtown area, once anchored by Sears, JC Penney, and Montgomery Ward department stores, is a shadow of its former self.
Triplett witnessed economic devastation around her, with classmates no longer attending school, marriages breaking up, and families going bankrupt. Triplett’s father, a union leader at a pottery factory, was not affected by the 1987 layoffs. His uncle also lost his job at a factory and eventually had to move to South Carolina to find work.
The whole experience left an unforgettable impression that continues to drive the triplets to this day.
“I saw this socio-economic freefall and its effects firsthand,” Triplett told CNN. “I wanted to understand why something like that was happening to me and my community, but more importantly, I wanted to understand how to prevent it from happening.”
“We came to the conclusion early on that we needed to be at the forefront of innovation,” he added.
The U.S. biotech industry is overwhelmingly concentrated in Boston and California, where venture capitalists pour in hundreds of millions of dollars each year and pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in the search for the next potentially life-saving therapy.
Triplett doesn’t downplay the importance of the work; he just feels that “this much concentration creates echo chambers, groups thinking, and a lack of diversity of ideas and diversity of technology.”
He was also quick to point out that research centers such as Nashville, Tennessee, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas, are driving innovation in biotechnology. “Their ideas are just as good as people in Boston or San Francisco,” he said.
But prestige still favors the coast.
“If you’re located in the interior of the country, it’s very difficult to get the attention of (venture capitalists) when you have a coastal bias,” Triplett said.
“It is essential to the strength and well-being of this country that wealth is not distributed only to the coasts,” he added. “I think the country as a whole needs a diverse range of innovation centers.”
A place where “talent and ambition come together”
To address this challenge, Ohio State launched the Columbus Innovation District in 2021, bringing together two leading local universities: The Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital, with the goal of creating 20,000 new jobs over the next 10 years, including 10,000 in science and technology fields.
Triplett served as an advisor on the project and worked with the InnovateOhio Advisory Board and the University Design Committee to construct an anchor facility to achieve the project’s ambitious goals.
Five years later, Ohio State University calls the district “a place where talent and ambition meet. A place where imagination and ideas take shape and grow into tangible realities and solutions. A place where opportunities to socialize and relax are just around the corner.”
The complex stands as impressive evidence of the region’s embrace of life sciences, linking academia and the public and private sectors to the university’s campus.
More than 40 companies are currently located in the area, and the university says more than 3,000 Ohio State employees work in the area, with 1,000 new jobs created starting in 2021.
The Ohio Board of Regents also approved what will be called the Timashev Technology Tower, a 100,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility to support health science research and technology startups.
Triplet has entered into partnerships with universities to help bring in more investors and startups. Currently co-founder and chairman of Armatus Bio, Triplett also works with Nationwide Children’s Hospital to innovate life-saving technology. The hospital has seen major advances, including FDA-approved gene therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and spinal muscular atrophy.
“At the end of the day, the patient wins,” he said. “If we do that, our local economies will benefit and our country will be stronger.”
Dennis Durbin, director of the Abigail Wexner Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said Triplett is an important partner “in the development of a biotechnology hub here in central Ohio.”
“Mike Triplett’s story, seen through the lens of Nationwide Children’s Hospital, mirrors our own,” Durbin said. “He is someone with a proven track record of being able to raise the capital needed to start these companies. He is one of those people who thrives in a network of connected people and organizations.”
Durbin said Triplet’s vision aligns with the hospital’s growth from a premier regional medical center to a state-of-the-art, world-class facility.
Durbin said it didn’t happen out of nowhere, with hospital leaders “starting making internal investments and making external connections with other partners in the region to realize this vision” more than 20 years ago. One area that has proven important is the hospital’s efforts in gene therapy, a technique that modifies a person’s genes to treat or cure disease, Durbin said.
“At a time when most people were leaving the hospital, there was visionary leadership within the hospital to stay in the field of gene therapy,” Durbin said. “We now have three FDA-approved gene therapies from Nationwide Children’s Hospital, which were the building blocks for this biotech hub in central Ohio.”
Triplett holds an endowed fellowship in gene therapy at the hospital and is a constant advocate for research coming out of the hospital’s labs.
Edward Poulin, president and CEO of the Ohio Life Sciences Association, simply said, “If only we had 12 more Mike Tripletts to bring attention to this important industry.”
A first-generation college graduate, Triplett runs the scarlet blood of the Ohio State Buckeyes.
When he entered college more than 20 years ago, he vowed that if he had the means, he would do everything in his power to help the nation provide better economic hope for future generations. When I was a boy, such things seemed elusive.
“We are still in the early stages of this journey,” Triplett said. “But we have great momentum.”
