Private companies, academia, incubators, funding, make San Francisco Bay Area a bioscience hotspot.

Transcription

1 The Hub

2 Private companies, academia, incubators, funding, make San Francisco Bay Area a bioscience hotspot. Some life sciences clusters grow as a natural combination of academia and a critical mass of successful trailblazing companies. Others are built by intention via concerted efforts by public and private entities to put in place the infrastructure needed to support fledgling companies. Today, the San Francisco Bay Area has risen to the top tier of the world s handful of biotech hubs via both avenues. The Bay Area is probably best known as the birthplace of biotech and its poster child for success, Genentech, but it would be selling the region short if there were no recognition of Gilead Sciences, BioMarin Pharmaceuticals and a host of others that have helped build a deep pool of both research and startup management talent. 81 THE HUB While large biotechs are often the spawning ground of innovation and new companies just this past May three ex-genentech executives raised $217 million for Denali Therapeutics, a company focused on neurodegenerative diseases investments over the past 15 years from academia have also played a role in strengthening the life sciences sector. This includes The California Institute for Quantitative Bioscience (QB3), a nonprofit research and technology commercialization institute spanning three University of California campuses: UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UC Santa Cruz and the development, more than a dozen years ago, of the Mission Bay District of San Francisco, an area that now houses, among other entities, the J. David Gladstone Institutes, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, UCSF Medical Center and Sandler Neurosciences Center.

3 Commenting in January, 2013 at the 10th anniversary of the opening of Genentech Hall, UCSF s first building in Mission Bay, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, then-chancellor of UCSF, noted the remarkable transformation of the area from one of an old rail yard with abandoned warehouses to the vibrant life sciences community it has become, boasting Nobel Laureates as well as hundreds of renowned researchers across a broad swath of disciplines.

4 It took bold steps by UCSF and by the city to make this a reality and all that boldness has paid off, Desmond-Hellmann said during the 10th anniversary celebration. Around us is a growing community of venture capital firms, entrepreneurs and bioscience companies that either spun out of UCSF or chose to locate here to collaborate with us, so they can translate these discoveries into new products and therapies that will improve health across the in $1.3 billion in grants from the National globe. This is now a nationally-renowned hub Institutes of Health compared with more of innovation and bioscience and every week than $3.3 billion for the whole of California. we get inquiries from other cities, universities, businesses and embassies to tour this campus so they can understand the secret sauce that makes this work. Spirit of entrepreneurship According to Sara Radcliffe, president and CEO of the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA), her organization estimates there are as And then there are the investments of companies coming from the outside, like Bayer, a foreign company with a huge presence now in the area that is interested in their own workforce development and career development. They came to the area because they thought it is where they are going to find the best talent and the best innovation, Radcliffe added. may as 2,000 life sciences companies operating Like Johnson & Johnson s JLABS, Bayer has in the San Francisco Bay Area. That spirit of innovation and the willingness to take risks but risks that are based on solid science make it a hotbed for attracting both public and private investments. According to CLSA figures, of the $3.8 billion in private venture funding secured by California bioscience companies in 2014, about 40 percent of that money, or $1.5 billion, went to companies operating in the Bay Area. Public funding followed a similar trend with area companies and research institutions hauling also opened an innovation center aimed to support new companies with new ideas as they perfect the science and move towards commercialization. Terry Hermiston, VP of biologics research at Bayer says the region s vibrancy and innovation are borne by the entrepreneurial spirit and abetted by a high tolerance for failure. THE HUB The area is home to many great assets and is obviously an entrepreneurial heavy weight, said Melinda Richter, head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation JLABS, The culture here is very unique to the Bay Area and it is hard to recreate that in other places. 83

5 Here, failure is often seen as a learning and something that will make you better in the future. In other cultures, it is seen strictly as a black mark if you are given an opportunity and you fail, it will be held against you the rest of your life and you will never be a given another chance, Hermiston said. That throttles innovation, entrepreneurial behavior and willingness to take risks. That is absolutely not the case here. That mentality also reaches down to those just starting their careers. Even people coming out of college are thinking right away of getting into a startup and making a name for themselves that way, as opposed to getting into a job At the Bayer U.S. Innovation Center, located Even those relationships between young in Mission Bay and directly across the street bioscience companies and established pharma from UCSF, the intention is much the same in companies that don t involve funding help their Collaborator, a separate 6,000-square- companies eventually capitalize their businesses. foot incubator where it provides both lab space and business support services, separate from its own business. What we realized with our own operations, is that if an idea is really innovative, you want to work as quickly as possible to execute that, noted Hermiston. Our feeling was that too often these startup companies get bogged down in that they have Unlike a lot of industries where they start measuring you based on your revenue, a lot of pharma and biotech companies are a long way away from revenue, added Feth. So these partnerships can be a nice measuring stick to see how you are doing and being close to those opportunities is very important. to develop the infrastructure, the office design, As Mrsny sees it, the venture firms contribute the lab design, etcetera. more than money to help keep the Bay Area humming with innovation. It is not just the where they are going to be there for forty years While other incubators run by private and retire with a standard type approach to companies vary in their approach to supporting life, added Randall Mrsny, CSO and co-founder the startup community, both JLABS and Bayer of startup company Applied Molecular Trans- work with those in their incubators with no port. strings attached. That said, there is a hope that, The final piece of the puzzle is the deep when appropriate, there may be opportunities talent pool ranging from top-level scientists to work with and partner with the resident in academia to serial entrepreneurs who have companies. taken the plunge on multiple occasions in an Supporting startups While the three UC schools have supported QB3 for about a dozen years and it has served as a good starting place for many small teams The indirect piece is we are a good partner. of researchers needing some lab space to People see that we are a good corporate citizen conduct proof-of-concept and other work, and want to work with us since they know are large corporate entities have also seen the going to be a supportive and interactive partner in benefit of committing resources in the Bay Area whatever endeavor we engage in, Hermiston said. to provide the space and support for fledgling life science companies. Johnson & Johnson, which runs JLABS in multiple cities, made its 40,000-square-foot facility in South San Francisco the crown jewel of its innovation efforts as it looks Access to capital Eventually startup companies will need additional capital to progress to the next step, and whether working in an incubator or on their own, new company founders and to encourage and tap into the life science scientists tout regular interactions with others innovation in the region. Its facility features in the life sciences community whether at a combination of both business and common symposia, within their incubator or even space with common research space including both wet and dry labs, tissue culture, chemistry labs, biology labs and the like, all fully equipped. JLABS seeks out companies that it believes have high potential to make a significant impact in improving health. The idea behind the JLABS facility is to level the playing field between external R&D teams and internal R&D teams at J&J, said Richter. We want to give them the same advantage that our internal R&D teams have. money they bring to the party, he said. They bring connections, too, and those are helpful to us. attempt to turn an idea into a business. The Bay Area speaks for itself. Everybody knows about it, concluded Mrsny, himself a former employee of Genentech. If we put a job description out, we get applications from all around the country, but we know that we don t need to fly someone in, we can find the person locally. That is why we get so many applications people want to be here and will come from all over to be a part of this. Advertising Index Affymetrix, Inc Page 23,30 Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc Page 50 picking up children at school as vital to Cancer Genetics, Inc Page 4 keeping their momentum. Canon Biomedical, Inc Page 57 Cambridge Healthtech Institute Page 45 If you look at the area it is not a surprise that Google and the center of the universe for high technology is down the street, said Brian Feth, CEO of startup company Xcell Bioscience. It has attracted a lot of venture capital to the area and a lot of the tools that are useful for technology are becoming much more useful for healthcare, not only from a digital health perspective but also in our business of genetic data. EPEMED Page 59 Human Longevity, Inc Page 2 Oracle Health Sciences Page 37 PMC Page 65 Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey Page 54 Seracare Lifesciences Page 1,2 Silicon Biosystems S.p.A Page 55 Source Bioscience IBC Sysmex Inostics GmbH Page 53 Swift Biosciences, Inc Page 25 Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc Page 49 Waters Corporation OBC