North Carolina has been seeing a lot of recent rewards for its long-term investment in the life sciences.

In fact, the recently released CED Innovators Report shows life science companies nailed down more than $268 million in equity investment in the first half of 2015.

That’s by far the biggest sector among those covered by the report. And it helps showcase the value of the state’s 31 years of continuous support for the loan and grant programs and other business-boosting activities of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.

The CED report tracking the state’s technology-based entrepreneurial activity shows the life science intake more than double that of tech companies’ $114 million haul during the period. That was followed by $34 million in advanced manufacturing & materials, and $10 million in cleantech.

The report shows North Carolina’s entrepreneurial companies raised about $427 million, 70 percent more funding in the first half of 2015 than during the same period a year earlier.

What’s more, the good news for the state’s life science sector continued to flow through the third quarter. A few examples of what that looked like:

  • Phoundry Pharmaceuticals, a peptide drug-discovery startup in Research Triangle Park, is being acquired by Boston-based Intarcia Therapeutics only seven months after Phoundry was spun out of GlaxoSmithKline. All nine Phoundry employees will stay in RTP, where they’ll be joined by nine new hires in the coming 12 to 18 months.
  • Duke University spin-out TransEnterix, a Morrisville medical device company, is paying $100 million to buy the surgical robotics division of Italian health care company Sofar, to accelerate the global commercialization and reach of its (pun intended) cutting-edge surgical systems.
  • Durham development-stage drug company Scioderm, which announced at the end of August that it’s being acquired by Amicus Therapeutics of Cranbury, N.J., for what could approach $1 billion, has also just notched a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to continue its rolling phase two drug trials. The 2-year-old company is developing the world’s first topical therapy for the treatment of blisters and lesions on the skin of people with epidermolysis bullosa, a rare, disfiguring and deadly genetic disease of the connective tissue.
  • Mayne Pharma, a publicly traded pharmaceutical company based in Melbourne, Australia, announced in August it’s embarking on a three-year, $65 million, 110-employee expansion of the Greenville campus it established in 2012.
  • Also in August, Novo Nordisk, a key member of North Carolina’s globally significant biomanufacturing landscape, said it’s adding a projected $1.85 billion expansion and doubling its workforce of 700 at its 22-year-old Clayton campus in Johnston County.
  • Another August bombshell: In a two-day span, Raleigh’s Sprout Pharmaceuticals won FDA approval to sell its drug Addyi — and then sold itself for $1 billion in cash to Quebec pharma giant Valeant Pharmaceuticals International. Valeant plans to to let Sprout stay in Raleigh