A friend of mine is in the same boat. A very solid researcher in biotech who was consulting for years and finally was unemployed has had a hell of a time finding work.
Biotech in Seattle seems to have died slowly over the last 5 years. I used to be in the industry and wish I still were, but the jobs are not there, so I switched to plain old vanilla software dev - not as intellectually interesting or technologically as cool - that's for sure. I miss the days where I actually wrote software whose domain could keep my intellectual flame lit.
Good luck, man!