Regional Hot Spots, Part 2

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a four-part series on regional hot spots for life sciences employment. Additional installments will appear in the July 9 and October 29 issues. San Francisco Bay Area boosters like to claim the title "Birthplace of Biotech" as their own. After all, the initial developments in recombinant DNA research took place through a collaboration by the labs of Herbert W. Boyer at University of California at San Francisco and Stanley Cohen at Stanford University.1 Then, the founding of Genentech on April 7, 1976 by Boyer and venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson signaled a potential for a viable industry based on the science and technology derived from that research.2 Now, 25 years later, Genentech is but one of about 500 biotech firms that directly and indirectly account for some 120,000 jobs in the Bay Area. Most of the firms employ fewer than 49 people; Genentech, the largest, employs 3,000. The area's academic and research institutions provide work for another 10,000 people involved with life science projects. The Bay Area Bioscience Center (www.bayareabioscience.org), which supplied many of the figures for this article, describes itself as "a public-private partnership and forum organized to strengthen the competitiveness of the region as the premier global location for bioscience research, education, and industry." According to Susan Day, president of the center, money from venture capitalists who helped the high-tech industry boom in Silicon Valley also helped biotech to boom in the Bay Area. The development of the NASDAQ, which somewhat parallels the same time frame, was also good fortune for biotech, she says. "[It] meant there was a stock market that was able to issue stock on the promise of profit in the future and not on existing profit." What Slowdown? Recent talk of economic slowdown has not dampened Bay Area companies' thirst for new, highly skilled employees. Even the demise of numerous dot-coms is seen, not as a disaster, but an opportunity to land skilled, computer-savvy employees for the biotech industry. "Because dot-com guys are losing personnel, we [have] the ability to get at some of those computer guys. Every biotech company has to have people that understand biological data and put them into systems and analyze them," Day says, referring to the need for bioinformatics professionals. Courtesy of University of California, San FranciscoChristopher Scott, UCSF vice chancellor for research and development, pauses before the work-in-progress. But officials at UCSF are hoping that the recent NASDAQ downturn and general economic conditions don't hamper their efforts to develop what could be the next major landmark for Bay Area biotech: a 300-acre Mission Bay project that aims to surround the 43-acre UCSF bioscience and biotech campus with private biotech firms. Christopher Scott, assistant vice chancellor for research and development at UCSF, says about the financial uncertainties, "I think we're all worried about it to some extent. The financial market is really what drives a lot of this. If you have [initial public offerings] that shut down, if you [don't] have mezzanine venture funding [a third or fourth round of money-raising that can pay for the drug approval process, for example], which is extremely hard to come by right now for companies, then the entire market tends to draw in, and that's what we're seeing in the entire Bay Area now. And companies that don't feel flush, or don't feel like they can make expansion moves, [or] aren't willing to buy a new building." But the hiring continues, because "the science always stays central to any company," says Scott, who previously worked for 10 years in biotech for companies and started two of his own. According to Scott Morrison, life science practice leader at Ernst & Young's San Jose office, the Bay Area leads other areas of the country in product sales, total revenues investment, and R&D spending. He views the UCSF project as being able to succeed in its goal of bringing biotech companies into the city of San Francisco. Shifting the Lines Up to now, most of these biotech jobs have been outside those city limits. For example, Lilia Babé, a senior scientist at Genencor International in Palo Alto, notes that her company has been "hiring quite a lot" since it went public last summer. The company is planning to branch out into pharmaceuticals from its long-established industrial reagents business. "We have a lot of openings right now. There's a big push to fill positions. There's no talk of slowing down." Looking at the entire Bay Area biotech employment picture, Babé says there are opportunities at all levels--from qualified people at the bachelor's and master's levels to senior scientists. The hiring seems now to be more from within the Bay Area than from recruiting people to come to it. "San Francisco has a ready market of people who move from one company to another, so there are trained people everywhere. You don't have to change ZIP codes to have a career in biotechnology," says David Jensen, managing director of Search Masters International, a biotech and pharmaceutical recruitment firm in Sedona, Ariz. "San Francisco used to be a drawing card for people from all over the country. The biotechnology community could count on a steady influx of people. Now that is drying up. The small biotech companies have to pull from each other. I spoke to a hiring manager in a small company in South San Francisco who told me he is frustrated by six months of recruiting for a scientist position for which he had offers turned down, because people are concerned about electric power, earthquakes, the extraordinarily high cost of living," he says. Bruce Morimoto, director of drug development at NeuroMed Technologies in Redwood City, tells a similar story of the difficulty in luring people to the Bay Area, where he says, "housing prices have gone through the roof." Acknowledging those concerns, Morrison insists the demand for people is intense. "Bottom line is there are more companies demanding trained Ph.D.s and scientists than there are available in the Bay Area. Small start-ups out here that I work with are looking for 30 or 40 people out of the blocks. Then there are companies that are starting to hit that next phase that are looking for hundreds of people to come in," he says. That voracious appetite for trained personnel can offset the high living costs, maintains Day of the Bioscience Center. "This is such a knowledge-based economy in the Bay Area, that virtually everyone in biotech has a spouse that's also a professional, and we have so many different types of jobs here, that a two-profession family can easily satisfy employment for both husband and wife," she says noting, that she is in San Francisco because her husband took a biotech job. Another factor in the growth of Bay Area biotech is what Babé refers to as "the environment in Silicon Valley," which will help in the development of bioinformatics. "It's an angle that we have that I don't think other areas do as much," she says. Morrison agrees, "Biology is rapidly becoming an information science," and the proximity to the "computing power "in the area is a key factor in biotech growth. Beyond the solid intellectual foundation that the biotech of the Bay Area rests on, there appears to be a strong entrepreneurial culture. Morrison talks of serial entrepreneurs who have started several biotech companies; UCSF's Scott is just one example. And he seems to be the embodiment of another type of phenomenon; of people going back and forth between private business and the university. In the Bay Area, individuals can spend portions of a career in academe, a company, and in venture capital companies. "That's very rare, even in the U.S.," comments Day. Harvey Black is a freelance science writer in Madison, Wis. References 1. S.N. Cohen et al., "Construction of biologically functional bacterial plasmids in-vitro," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 70:3240-4, 1973. 2. See www.gene.com/gene/about_genentech/history. Bay Area Biotech Jobs Expanding The dot-com debacle hit the Bay Area hard, but talent, dedication, and an entrepreneurial spirit reminiscent of the 1850's may keep the Golden Gate city in the black. The California Employment Development Department's Labor Market Information Division reports a 3.9-percent annual growth in employment, from March 2000 to March 2001 for the West Bay Area consisting of Marin, San Francisco, and San Mateo counties. The Department estimates that wage and salary jobs in the area totaled 1.11 million in March, up 6,500 from the previous month. Services industries lead the field and only the manufacturing industry has recorded a decline. The strength and size of once tiny start-ups like Genentech give the Bay Area bragging rights as the birthplace of biotechnology. The talented people from these companies and the local universities have created generations of new start-ups. While some Bay Area companies have experienced the pressure of a braking economy in the form of layoffs and funding scrambles, other companies and academic institutions expect to grow in the year 2001. The experience of the following groups provides a snapshot of the Bay Area biotech job scene: Genentech put out 438 job requisitions for the year 2001, a slight increase over requisitions in 2000. Three hundred positions had been filled by the end of April with roughly equal shares going into sales and marketing, research, medical affairs, and manufacturing. The remaining jobs are spread across administrative areas. Sandie Wade, senior employment manager for Genentech, expects that nearly half of all new employees will relocate from other cities. "We are looking for the brightest people in the world." The human resources department at the University of California, San Francisco expects 300 new Staff Research Associates (SRAs) to join the school as it prepares for the completion of the Mission Bay campus. That number does not include salary and nonsalary faculty or postdoctoral positions. Of the 288 associates hired in 2000, 23 were hired as SRA IIIs, and 3 were hired as SRA IVs--positions that generally require at least a bachelor's degree plus years of experience. Novozymes Biotech Inc. is the research arm of Novozymes A/S in Bagsvaerd, Denmark, a provider of industrial enzymes. Novozymes Biotech, which is based in Davis, plans to hire 30 researchers in 2001 with an even split between people with Ph.D.s and with other degrees. About half will be relocating from other regions, reports Glenn Nedwin, the company's president. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, on the hillside above the University of California, Berkeley, hired about 300 people in career positions last year, and trends indicate the lab will recruit a total of 400 this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2001. Roughly 35 percent of the positions will be for researchers and another 25 percent for lab technicians. The remaining openings will be in administrative and bioinformatics jobs. The company expects to fill most vacancies with Bay area professionals, according to its human resources department. Cell Genesys, a gene therapy company in Foster City, plans to hire 50 people in the year 2001, down from 110 in 2000. While the company provided no breakdown on the new positions, current researchers outnumber administrative employees by more than half, with 85 holding bachelor's, 20 master's, 30 Ph.D.s, and 5 M.D.s. Cell Genesys imports approximately 10 percent of its employees from other regions. --Brendan A. Maher

Regional Hot Spots, Part 2

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