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Harvard assesses its role in innovation economy

A Harvard School of Public Health facility in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. The university plans a campus in Allston that could house biomedical companies.Dina Rudick/Globe Staff/Globe Staff

Harvard University has long played an outsized role in spurring the growth of the Boston area’s life sciences industry, but the school’s contributions have largely unfolded behind the scenes.

Unlike the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge’s Kendall Square — the beating heart of biotech — Harvard has been known less for spinning off startups than for licensing cutting-edge research and grooming the industry’s business leaders.

But as plans progress for an “enterprise research campus” that could house biomedical companies in Boston’s Allston neighborhood in coming years, Harvard officials have begun to take stock of the university’s place in the region’s innovation economy. Some newly crunched numbers, published on a Harvard website that went live last month, community.harvard.edu/impact, detail its strong ties to life sciences researchers and entrepreneurs.

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Between 2011 and 2013, for example, Harvard drew $2.5 billion in research dollars — much of it devoted to basic science at the university and its medical and public health schools — that underlies drug discovery. Nearly two-thirds of Massachusetts startups and 90 percent of biotechs that got venture capital in the same period had Harvard connections.

In 2013, when companies in Massachusetts attracted about$3 billion in venture capital funding, research dollars from the National Institutes of Health totaled $2.4 billion. Of that, a huge portion, $1.5 billion, went to Harvard institutions, including its academic labs and affiliated teaching hospitals, such as Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women’s, Boston Children’s, Beth Israel Deaconess, and Dana-Farber.

The school has enjoyed plenty of success in the broader business world, too. Fifteen venture-backed biotech startups with Harvard ties have gone public since 2011. Among them are Acceleron Pharma Inc., Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc., Bluebird Bio Inc., Genocea Biosciences Inc., Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc., Verastem Inc., and Zafgen Inc.

Genocea chief executive Chip Clark, who earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard, said his Cambridge company has been testing a pair of experimental vaccines, using a unique approach to killing pathogens hiding from antibodies in infected cells. Clark said the company licensed its technology from the lab of a Harvard Medical School microbiology and immunobiology professor, Darren Higgins, who serves as a Genocea adviser.

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“We’re happy to have the Harvard connection,” Clark said. “It’s a tremendous boon to biotech.”

Harvard’s planned enterprise research campus, on 36 acres off Western Avenue, would seek to attract life sciences, Internet and Big Data startups, and nonprofits.

The site will be surrounded by Harvard’s engineering and applied science building, its business school, and Genzyme’s biotech drug manufacturing plant. The project is part of Harvard’s 10-year institutional master plan for Allston, approved last year by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. School officials are still working on a timetable for developing the land.

“I think of Harvard as a great institution that is global in its outlook, but very much grounded in the region,” said provost Alan M. Garber, who is leading the planning of the enterprise research campus. “And it’s in our interest that the Boston area has the most dynamic, forward-looking economy in the world. We want to create the conditions that allow businesses to thrive."

But Garber stops short of promising that Harvard will be launching startups and moving to guide the industry’s expansion. “Harvard is a decentralized institution,” he said. “The university does all it can to make sure its students and faculty are successful.”

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Still, there is a sense that the school may be stepping up its role in the life sciences.

“Harvard has had a deep impact in this industry, but it has not been as purposeful,” said Alexis Borisy, a partner at Third Rock Ventures, a Boston firm that funds early-stage biopharma businesses. “Harvard people have been independent entrepreneurs and they sparked lots of startup activity. MIT has always had a more purposeful role and had one of the original pioneering technology licensing offices that helped them to facilitate that.”

Borisy, who has started Cambridge companies such as CombinatoRx Inc. and Foundation Medicine Inc., considers his own story typical. As a graduate student at Harvard, he worked in a lab under Stuart L. Schreiber, who helped found biotechs such as Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc. as well as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

“I had exposure to the companies he started, and that got me excited about this industry,” Borisy said.

Borisy said there are signs that Harvard is becoming more “facilitative” toward the Boston-area life sciences industry. Those signs include the enterprise campus, the opening of an innovation lab next to the business school, and the launch of an accelerator program that bankrolls academic projects before they can attract private funding.

As the biotech cluster ripples out from Kendall Square, where the price of leasing office and lab space is rising, “the Allston campus is an opportunity,” Borisy said. “We’ll have to see what happens. It could become a very powerful, meaningful place.”

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Robert Weisman can be reached at robert.weisman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeRobW.