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Arizona's biotech companies are showing continued growth, but fixed costs and lack of capital may pose problems for some in the industry, one leading expert said at an annual conference in Tucson Tuesday.

At a luncheon speech, Celtic Therapeutics LLLP co-founder Peter B. Corr said problems include "massive" patent expirations and a lack of capital for some companies.

At the same time, Corr, a well-known pharmaceutical executive and academic, said growth among Arizona's biotech firms is palpable.

"If I would have given this talk 10 years ago, there would have been one table, maybe two," he said. At Tuesday's event, Arizona biotech leaders filled more than a dozen tables.

That growth among Arizona's biotech companies is contributing more to the state's economy, positioning Southern Arizona to be a center for innovation, said Joe Snell, CEO of Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc..

"We have a significant opportunity to be a leading biotech hub," he said.

Snell commented as part of Biozona 2008, an annual biotech conference hosted by the Phoenix-based Arizona BioIndustry Association, or AZBio.

His optimism is furthered by growth in companies in Tucson, including Ventana Medical Systems, which was acquired in January by global pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG in a deal closely watched on Wall Street.

Bioscience firms grew 16.7 percent from 2002 through 2006, rising from 639 to 745. Those figures, from a 2007 update to the Arizona Bioscience Roadmap, showed that the growth rate was "substantially faster" than the rest of the country.

At the same time, Arizona bioscience-job growth is outpacing the nation's, rising by 18.5 percent during the same period to more than 80,900 jobs.

That growth has been apparent in Southern Arizona. Merck & Co. made a multimillion-dollar investment last October in Tucson-based High Throughput Genomics Inc., and Sanofi-Aventis began an expansion of its Oro Valley facility last fall.

Besides speeches by Corr and other industry experts, Biozona offered breakout sessions on biotech trends, business funding and patent law. It was the first year of the annual event since the Tucson-based BioIndustry Organization of Southern Arizona, known as Bio-SA, merged with AZBio.