If you’re a medical device manufacturer with plans to expand or a medtech founder looking for somewhere to get started, the Maryland Department of Commerce would like to have a word about Baltimore.

They’re hoping Maryland’s largest city and the surrounding regions can join Boston, Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay Area as a medtech hub with a supporting ecosystem of researchers, suppliers, contract manufacturers, international airports and ocean shipping terminals — plus proximity to experts and decision-makers at FDA, NIH, CMS (all headquartered in Maryland) and other federal operations.

“A really great benefit of being here in Maryland is that we have all the assets to take your idea all the way to market,” Maryland Department of Commerce Life Sciences Director Stefanie Trop said in an interview. “We have the large companies, but we’re definitely stronger on the early stage companies. That said, we have tons of engineering services and suppliers and expertise in regulatory affairs, reimbursement and in commercialization.”

Baltimore is “a one-call city,” said Ulyana Desiderio, senior director for Maryland Commerce’s Office of Strategic Industries and Entrepreneurship. “… It only takes you one call to get connected to five more people that you need.”

The fields of neurotechnology, oncology, biotechnology and infectious disease in particular draw on the history and expertise from Maryland-based institutions ranging from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and Howard University to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

NIH has sent more R&D contracts to Maryland than any other state, totaling $1.3 billion in 2023. NIH (headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland) funds the NeuroTech Harbor equitech accelerator, a partnership between Johns Hopkins and Howard.

Major medtech OEMs with Maryland operations include Becton, Dickinson & Co. (BD, which has its Integrated Diagnostic Solutions business headquarters in Sparks), Alcon and Terumo Medical Corp.

But Maryland wants more.

“We can serve them here, because we have the talent,” Trop said. “We have the top STEM talent — especially PhD educated talent — in the country, and we’ve got really fantastic biomedical engineering programs out of our universities, and we have really strong workforce. A big component of that is because of our diversity in our population across the state, and that’s really critical, and what makes us unique, and we think it’s a huge asset.”

“That is a big priority for the government and that’s reflected in all of our programs that support entrepreneurs and companies,” she continued. “That’s been a really big focus of these initiatives on equitech, on supporting underserved populations like pediatrics and underserved disadvantaged founders with lots of special funding dedicated to helping lift those populations up in developing their businesses, in supporting entrepreneurs within Baltimore.”

The state also incentivizes advanced manufacturing and life sciences funding, including a dedicated program that offers tech investors refunds worth up to $500,000.

“Our companies are really great at taking advantage of it,” Trop said, “especially these medical device companies in Baltimore, so much so that we have one investment fund and others coming online that are developing their whole investment strategy around utilizing these funds.”

And for device developers of all sizes that want more resiliency in their supply chains, Baltimore appears to be less vulnerable to climate change impacts like fires, hurricanes and other weather disasters — though this year’s hurricane season showed the risk even extends to seemingly sheltered regions.

Baltimore also offers the opportunity to keep a device developer’s supply chain local, Desiderio said.

“In Maryland, you can still find a glass blower. You can still find somebody who can do injection molding for you or has a steel mill,” she said. “… You can take your product from an idea on the back of the napkin all the way to the box that you sell to your customer.”

While Baltimore is the center of Maryland medtech, Frederick an hour away offers more space for manufacturing — and it’s home to NCI Frederick as well as Department of Defense medical research facilities.

Then there’s Montgomery County, with biotechs like GSK, AstraZeneca and Otsuka, plus the headquarters of the NIH in Bethesda and FDA in nearby Silver Spring.

“You’re going to be walking your dog, and you’re going to run into people from the FDA,” Desiderio said. “There’s something about building a relationship with somebody that you can just call them. Corporate leadership and investors really like face-to-face meetings with regulators and payers. And if you say, ‘I’ve met with FDA three times, and here’s the outcome from my meetings,’ that still matters.”

And there might not be a better place for reimbursement innovation than the backyard of CMS, headquartered in the Baltimore suburb of Woodlawn. Maryland is participating in CMS efforts to develop and refine value-based healthcare programs

“When we talk about innovators talking to FDA early and often, we also want to be the kind of state that provides an opportunity for innovators to talk to payers, whether that’s CMS or VA or private payers early and often,” Desiderio said. “… We have gone through the pains of trying to figure out how to get reimbursed for value based care [and] there’s a lot of innovators here who have thought about the future of healthcare delivery and healthcare reimbursement, and have created solutions to get patient care based on value to the payers.”

“A lot of states eventually are going to have to catch up,” she later continued.