City of Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and City of Phoenix Community and Economic Development Director Christine Mackay recently spoke to Arizona PBS about the growth of the Phoenix Bioscience Core and the city’s life science industry as a whole. Speaking to Arizona Horizon, Mayor Gallego noted how Phoenix has become a hot spot for life science companies from around the world.

“There was just a study of emerging bioscience markets, we are number one in life science job growth, in companies that are spilling out of our universities, the City of Phoenix invested in bringing T-Gen to our core, and we’ve had 30 companies come out of there,” Mayor Gallego said.

The city of Phoenix currently has more than 5.5 million square feet of bioscience health care facilities under development or in the pipeline. That makes Phoenix 2nd in the country behind Boston for new lab space under construction, said Mackay.

Check out the full interview with Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and Phoenix Director Christine Mackay below! The interview starts at the 19:15 mark.

The Phoenix Bioscience Core is continuing to grow. Established in the early 2000s by the city of Phoenix, the PBC is now the only place in Arizona where all three of the state’s public research universities —  Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona — all colocate, as well as companies such as the Translational Genomics Research Institute, the Dignity Cancer Institute, Oncomyx Therapeutics and more.

The universities are continuing to place large investments in the PBC. The University of Arizona recently showcased the new Center for Advanced Molecular and Immunological Therapies development it plans to build at 7th St. and Fillmore, and Wexford Science + Technology recently announced plans to build its Wexford Innovation Labs, a 34,000 square foot life sciences incubator and coworking space at 850 PBC, a joint development project between Wexford and Arizona State University.