Marrow-Tech to Relocate in San Diego

Marrow-Tech, a New York-based biotechnology firm that has developed laboratory-grown versions of human skin and bone marrow, is moving its operations to San Diego, company officials said Monday.

Marrow-Tech has signed a five-year lease for a 20,000-square-foot facility in the Calbiochem Center in La Jolla, said Arthur J. Benvenuto, the company’s president and chief executive officer. Marrow-Tech plans to complete its move by the end of January.

The company will augment its staff of 20 employees, but Benvenuto declined to say how many new workers Marrow-Tech will hire once the company relocates. He said he is recruiting primarily research-and-development and manufacturing technicians.

“We opted for San Diego because it’s one of the major hotbeds of biotechnology research in the country,” said Dr. Ron Cohen, Marrow-Tech’s vice president of corporate and government affairs. “There are also several institutions, for example UCSD and the Salk Institute, that are sensitive to the need of nurturing companies like us. They also offer a great pool of talent that we can draw from.”

Marrow-Tech, founded in January, 1986, held its initial public stock offering in June, 1988, raising $6 million, and has yet to generate revenue except for interest income. Next year, the company will introduce its first line of products: laboratory-grown human skin that will be used by manufacturers to test cosmetics, drugs and chemicals.

Manufacturers have been under increasing pressure from animal-rights activists to find alternatives to laboratory animals in conducting tests to determine whether a product is safe for humans.