Insiders reveal how Boston moved to the forefront of the global fight against deadly diseases

The Gritstone team in their lab.Lydia Ramsey/Business Insider

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Boston is undoubtedly the place to be if you want to go into biotech.

Along with San Francisco, the Boston area was where biotech as an industry had its roots. In the 1980s and 1990s, the industry started gaining traction, with companies moving into Cambridge to set up shop.

The metro area is home to almost 1,000 biotechnology companies —from the earliest startups, to $50 billion companies — academic centers, and life science organizations.

Boston has been home to major developments in how we treat cancer, therapies to tackle rare genetic diseases, and research for cutting-edge technologies like the gene-editing tool CRISPR.

Despite $1 billion+ investments in New York and other efforts to spark the industry, there’s something missing there that Boston seems to have. With that in mind, when Business Insider recently visited the city, we asked locals: What’s the “special sauce” that makes the Boston area such a hub for drug discovery and development?

Here’s what we found.