As I walk through Penn Medicine, past the laboratories where Nobel Prize-winning mRNA research was conducted and where CAR-T therapy was invented, I am reminded that Philadelphia will remain a hub of future innovation because it is home to Penn research scientists. What happens at places like Penn Medicine is far more profound than scientific achievement. Penn Medicine converts curiosity into prosperity, not just for the city of Philadelphia and our citizens, but for people across the globe who will never set foot in these buildings.
I believe in the old maxim, few lead many, and those few live and work in cities that monetize research and innovation. The places where curious minds gather to push beyond known horizons have always served as the engines that pull civilization forward. And the return on investment in these concentrations doesn’t just compound locally, it radiates outward in waves that touch billions of lives.
Penn Medicine
To understand how Penn Medicine generates extraordinary returns, consider the sheer scale of brilliant human capital clustered here. Penn Medicine comprises over 7,000 faculty and research staff and 4,590-plus students, postdoctoral trainees, residents and fellows working across 28 basic science and clinical departments. It is not just an institution, it is a tiny city of innovators, all focused on advancing human health.
The infrastructure supporting this talent is equally impressive: 35 interdisciplinary centers and institutes and 47 departmental centers collaborating and merging various disciplines. Over 900 faculty conduct sponsored clinical research, with over 2,320 clinical research studies underway and 151,426 patients enrolled in active clinical research studies. This infrastructure creates a direct connection between discovery happening in laboratories and clinical application.
Penn’s multidisciplinary focus contributes to its success. Penn Medicine faculty from dozens of institutes, centers, and departments work in teams spanning 11 other schools at the University of Pennsylvania, including experts in informatics, bioengineering, and robotics. Imagine cancer biologists consulting with data scientists, clinical oncologists working alongside biomedical engineers, pharmacologists collaborating with materials scientists. The multidisciplinary infrastructure, the collaborative culture, the clinical connections, the technology transfer expertise, all of this took decades to build and now enables discovery at a pace impossible to replicate quickly elsewhere.
Results: more than 45 FDA-approved indications since 2013 and 64 patents in fiscal year 2025 alone. That is dominance on steroids.
These FDA approvals represent decades of basic research, clinical trials involving thousands of patients, regulatory review, manufacturing scale-up, and finally deployment to healthcare systems worldwide. Penn’s investment in faculty salaries, laboratory equipment, and clinical infrastructure has multiplied through each stage and it is now helping patients across every continent. This is investment in research that cannot just be measured quarterly but across generations.
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The patents represent potential future multiplications. Each patent represents knowledge that can be licensed, commercialized, and transformed into therapies or technologies benefiting people who will never know the researchers’ names. Some will be licensed to existing pharmaceutical companies, accelerating development by decades compared to starting from scratch. Others will spawn entirely new companies, creating jobs and economic activity far from Philadelphia. A few will become foundational technologies enabling entire new fields of medicine. All begin with the concentration of curious minds, sophisticated equipment, and sustained funding that only places like Penn can provide at scale.
Penn Medicine recently opened a $376 million research center in September 2025, adding eight floors housing the Colton Center for Autoimmunity and the High-Throughput Institute for Discovery. Why? Not to maintain or defend market position, but to capture future breakthroughs.
The return on Penn’s historical investments is extraordinary. Penn researchers pioneered CAR-T cell therapy, a revolutionary cancer treatment. The FDA approved Casgevy in December 2023 as the first CRISPR/Cas9-based gene therapy for sickle cell disease in patients 12 and older, making it a landmark medical application of CRISPR technology, while in agriculture, CRISPR has been used to generate disease-resistant rice by disrupting susceptibility genes. The resulting economic spillovers from Penn’s research excellence now have a global reach, from farmers in rural Asia to cancer patients in South America, people who will never know the names of the researchers whose work saved their crops or their lives.
Local Investment. Global Returns.
Local investments in institutions like Penn Medicine create regional economic growth and generate tax revenues that fund further research, while solving global problems. Every dollar increase in university spending generates an 89-cent increase in local noneducation labor income, with effects lasting at least five years. University spending creates more than a simple multiplier effect. The knowledge spillover significantly contributes to common prosperity once entrepreneurship acts as an intermediary or an accelerant.
Between 1996 and 2020, university research generated 554,000 invention disclosures, 141,000 U.S. patents, and 15,000 startups, creating up to $1 trillion in GDP and $1.9 trillion in gross industrial output while supporting 6.5 million jobs. These aren’t just numbers on balance sheets, they represent treatments that saved lives, technologies that connected families, and innovations that fed hungry populations thousands of miles from the laboratories where they were conceived.
Consider the mRNA vaccines developed at Penn Medicine. The technology emerged from decades of curiosity-driven research with no obvious commercial application. Today, it has saved millions of lives globally during the COVID-19 pandemic and opened entirely new therapeutic pathways. Or, consider pig-to-human kidney transplants, blood tests that identify Alzheimer’s with 90 percent accuracy, and combination vaccines protecting against both COVID-19 and influenza. Each of these breakthroughs originated in research universities, and each will benefit humanity far beyond the cities that produced them.
When you have over 900 faculty conducting sponsored clinical research with over 2,320 active studies, you’re not starting from zero, you’re accelerating an already powerful engine. Additional investment doesn’t just add linearly; it multiplies exponentially as new faculty collaborate with existing teams, as new facilities enable experiments previously impossible, as new funding attracts additional talent creating even more breakthroughs.
When you have over 4,590 students, postdoctoral trainees, residents and fellows learning in this environment, you’re not just educating individuals, you’re training the next generation of innovators who will carry discoveries forward, teaching future generations, and solving problems we haven’t yet identified. This is intergenerational transfer of knowledge.
And timescale matters. Building a research institution with 7,060 faculty and staff, 4,590 trainees, 35 interdisciplinary centers, and 151,426 enrolled research patients doesn’t happen in one budget cycle or even one decade. It requires sustained commitment across multiple political administrations, consistent funding through economic ups and downs, and patience to allow excellence to compound.
Same Zip Code
Geography still matters in an age of instant global communication. Knowledge spillover effects are greater in cities where research universities and industry coexist in the same zip code. JLL’s 2025 Innovation Geographies study analyzing 108 cities worldwide found that the San Francisco Bay Area remains at the forefront of global innovation by a significant margin, outperforming most other regions in venture capital, R&D investment, productivity and breadth of talent.
Beijing, Boston, Tokyo, London, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai, New York and Paris complete the group of the world’s leading centers in terms of both innovation output and talent concentration. What these research cities share isn’t just excellent universities, it’s the critical mass of talent that creates self-reinforcing cycles of discovery and application.
They have the infrastructure: the specialized laboratories, the core facilities with equipment costing tens of millions of dollars, the clinical trial networks, the technology transfer offices that understand how to shepherd discoveries toward commercialization.
They have the legacy: institutional memory stretching back generations, relationships built over decades, and reputations that took centuries to establish.
And, they have the demonstrated ability to attract even more talent, creating innovation velocity impossible to replicate at a distance.
Most importantly, these research cities are also home to multiple world-class programs that often reside under one major institution. If a curious scientist observes an unexpected phenomenon, the university’s core facilities are equipped to enable deeper investigation, the technology transfer office is built out to protect the intellectual property and identify commercial potential, and local venture capital is ready with seed funding. A startup forms, recruiting specialized talent from the university and regional industry. The company scales, eventually serving markets worldwide. Each spinout represents knowledge becoming action, curiosity becoming commerce, local investment becoming global benefit.
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Philadelphia
Philadelphia’s potential lies precisely in this convergence. For example, Penn researchers can combine CAR-T cell therapy, originally developed at Penn for cancer, with mRNA technology, also pioneered at Penn, to create entirely new therapeutic approaches. Penn can create these convergences naturally. The density of Penn’s expertise and infrastructure cannot be quickly replicated or distributed; it accumulated over decades of sustained investment.
But, Philadelphia, unlike Boston, and Pennsylvania, unlike Massachusetts, have not made sustained, decades long investments in our region’s research and commercial infrastructure. Despite that, Penn Medicine continues to pierce concrete to grow a thriving garden of breakthroughs and discoveries. It is numero uno in licensing revenues in the country. Now just imagine if Penn receives similar support at the local and state level as its peers in Boston or the Valley.
Truth: taxpayer dollars invested in research institutions yield returns exceeding most conventional infrastructure spending. The returns on these investments benefit not just the host city but humanity at large. But university research is not always a top priority line item in PA state budgets; we treat these allocations as discretionary expenses and not strategic investments. That must change.
Beyond city and state support, Penn Medicine should be flooded with federal funding. To keep pace with our competition with China for technological leadership, the United States must invest more in university R&D and support programs and incentives that move ideas from labs to markets. The competition for innovation leadership is intensifying globally, and the countries and cities that increase investment now will capture the breakthroughs that define the next century.
The returns will compound over time in ways that will make them uniquely valuable investments. A dollar invested in highway construction produces economic activity for sure, but the original investment requires further investments to maintain the highway as it deteriorates. A dollar invested in basic research, on the other hand, produces a discovery that, once made, becomes part of humanity’s permanent knowledge base. We still benefit from discoveries made a century ago.
Cities like Philadelphia that already have major research institutions should see this as their decisive competitive advantage and invest accordingly. Research parks and communities of innovation fuel job creation by helping startups succeed, providing space, labs, and talent pipelines that drive a 75% survival rate, far above the national average of 49%. In Philadelphia, the infrastructure exists, the talent pipeline is established, the reputation should attract more talent, and now is the moment to press the advantage.
And the investment must be sustained over decades, not years. It requires recruiting star faculty, building specialized facilities, creating clinical partnerships, and fostering an entrepreneurial culture. Examples of cities like Raleigh and Austin prove it can be done.
Moral Imperative
Beyond economics, beyond competition, there’s a moral dimension to investing in research institutions like Penn. Humanity faces existential challenges: climate change threatening coastlines and agriculture, pandemic diseases emerging faster than we can respond, an aging population straining healthcare systems, antimicrobial resistance rendering our medicines obsolete. The solutions, waiting to be discovered, will most likely come from research universities.
When Penn Medicine invests $376 million in an autoimmune research center, they’re not just investing in Philadelphia’s economy. They’re investing in finding treatments for millions of people worldwide suffering from autoimmune conditions. When any city strengthens its research infrastructure, it increases the probability that humanity will solve problems affecting billions of people.
As Nobel Foundation chair Astrid Söderbergh Widding noted, perhaps the greatest health innovation of the past century wasn’t technological but social: the establishment of universal health norms and health as a human right. The discoveries enabling universal health came from research universities. The vaccines protecting children worldwide, the antibiotics fighting infections, the surgical techniques saving lives, all emerged from curiosity-driven research in institutions like Penn Medicine.
Last Word
Research cities where innovators live represent humanity’s best hope for navigating the challenges ahead. These are the people asking questions no one has answered, exploring possibilities no one has imagined, developing solutions to problems we don’t yet fully understand. Their work will benefit people who haven’t been born yet, in ways we cannot predict. Every innovation made at places like Penn becomes part of humanity’s collective inheritance.
Policymakers, your investment in institutions like Penn Medicine is not just good economic policy, it’s your obligation to the future. You have a choice: treat research funding as discretionary spending subject to budget cuts and short-term thinking or recognize it as the highest-return investment available, one that compounds across generations and benefits people worldwide.