BioscienceLA
When a region has everything it needs, except a way to see itself clearly.
Los Angeles has world-class research institutions, breakthrough startups, deep talent, and anchor institutions like Amgen, Cedars-Sinai, and PhRMA. By almost any measure, it should be one of the world’s great bioscience hubs. It wasn’t being seen that way — and the people inside the ecosystem couldn’t fully explain why.
Sector
Health & Science
Services
Ecosystem design
Platform design & build
Marketing & activation
Brand strategy
The Problem
There is a perception that LA’s bioscience sector is short on resources. It’s not. What it is short on is connective tissue between organizations, agencies, communities, students & startups.
BioscienceLA is a convener, accelerator, and regional development organization; responsible not just for its own success, but mandated to help improve the health of an entire ecosystem. When they came to Macroscopic for brand storytelling and narrative support, we quickly understood the communications challenge was a symptom of something structural.
The LA bioscience community was fragmented. Organizations operated in parallel without shared language, trustable data, or a shared story. Funders and policymakers couldn’t see the full picture. Underrepresented communities had little reason to trust institutions that had historically overlooked them. And established hubs like Boston had decades of accumulated credibility that LA couldn’t shortcut its way past.
You can’t brand your way out of a coordination problem. So we didn’t try.
The Bigger Pattern
The most important thing we’ve done for BioscienceLA isn’t any single deliverable. It’s helping an organization that serves an entire ecosystem develop the infrastructure to see that ecosystem clearly, and tell the ongoing story to bring others along with it. When organizations can’t tell a coherent story, it’s usually because they don’t yet have a coherent picture. Our job is to surface what’s real, build what’s needed, and keep telling the truth about where things stand.
Building a sector’s connective tissue
Rather than treating this as a linear engagement, our work with BioscienceLA has evolved across three dimensions that reinforce each other — and continues to grow.
Narrative & Brand Foundation
Through a series of facilitated workshops — covering brand storytelling, industry needs, and workforce development — we got disparate stakeholders into the same conversation for the first time. What emerged wasn’t just a messaging framework, it was a clearer, honest picture of what LA’s bioscience ecosystem is: its real assets, its genuine gaps, and the story that could credibly represent both.
That clarity had immediate impact. The strategic positioning we developed directly supported BioscienceLA’s successful CJF/Catalyst Grant application — securing $2.4M in funding that validated not just the story, but the strategy behind it.
Ecosystem Infrastructure
Narrative alignment was only the first layer. The underlying fragmentation problem — siloed data, isolated organizations, invisible connections — needed structural solutions. We’re now designing the shared infrastructure the ecosystem has been missing: a data intelligence platform that creates a verifiable picture of the sector’s assets and resources, coordination channels that make cooperation sustainable, and outreach programs to rebuild trust with historically underserved communities.
A baseline network map now shows, for the first time, the connections and gaps between ecosystem players. The platform is in active development, but the relationships and shared language it depends on are already doing their work.
Ongoing Communications & Sector Storytelling
Building new infrastructure requires a parallel story — one that brings stakeholders along as the work evolves, and positions LA credibly to the global bioscience community. As the ecosystem adapts and grows, we continue to shape how that progress gets told: to funders, to regional partners, to international audiences evaluating whether Los Angeles belongs in the conversation alongside Boston, San Diego, and the Bay Area.
Regional stakeholders are now using unified messaging in their own external communications, a sign that the narrative infrastructure is taking hold beyond our direct work.
What it’s unlocked
- $2.4M secured through a grant awarded by California Jobs First for a shared intelligence platform and activation campaign
- Pilot programs underway to bring underrepresented communities into talent pathways
- Unified messaging adopted by regional stakeholders in their own communications
- Baseline ecosystem map completed, giving stakeholders the first clear picture of ecosystem connections and gaps
