Panel Envisions County’s Future as a Center for Biotechnology

Drawing on the success of biotechnology firms already established in Thousand Oaks and across Ventura County, business leaders and county officials are working to turn the region into a hub for the growing industry.

The county’s 280 biotechnology companies with 5,400 employees can act together to tap into financial and intellectual resources, helping struggling start-up companies emulate the success of Thousand Oaks-based Amgen, said speakers at a Wednesday luncheon at Las Posas Country Club in Camarillo.

“It’s the next wave of manufacturing--sort of post-aerospace,” said Paul J. Silvern, a Los Angeles-based consultant working with county and business leaders. “As Ventura County moves away from dependence on aerospace, these are the businesses that are the next wave.”

Many local firms are young businesses facing a number of challenges, namely years of costly research and development before products eventually go to market, maintaining steady financing during that start-up period and sometimes cumbersome government regulations, analysts said.

Recalling Amgen’s start-up period, Tom Hardy, the company’s finance administrator, said young biotechnology companies often just “want to get to the point where they can breathe.”

But local business leaders and government officials believe that Ventura County’s biotechnology industry has matured to the point where firms can act collectively.

By creating organizations that seek out grant money and form partnerships with universities, Ventura County companies would follow steps taken in parts of California that have become biotechnology hubs, said Jon Gilchrist, a marketing manager with Medical Analysis Systems in Camarillo.

Gilchrist, who serves on a committee of business and government officials seeking to promote Ventura County’s biotechnology industry, said local firms should look at San Diego, where companies have joined with local universities to receive grant money and share research projects. “They’re really priming the pump,” he said.

Silvern said the success of Amgen--the biotech research company that reported revenues of $2.2 billion in 1996 and employs 3,000 people in Thousand Oaks--bodes well for the future of smaller local biotechnology firms because the company gives the county a magnet.

It attracts workers with expertise in biotechnology, and some of those people will eventually start their own businesses or go to work for other biotechnology firms in the county, he said.

But on the whole, many of the biotechnology firms in Ventura County are small companies with fewer than 100 employees, Silvern said.

On Wednesday, the committee formed groups to examine how biotechnology firms in Ventura County can gain better access to financing and attract a skilled labor force.

Using a $40,000 federal grant issued after the Northridge earthquake, Ventura County officials are trying to organize leaders of growth industries, such as plastics and environmental firms.

Del Tompkins, the county’s business ombudsman, said the meetings are aimed at increasing communication between bureaucrats and businesses.

“It’s a way for us to know if what we’re doing is inhibiting business growth,” Tompkins said. “Do we have practices that discourage people from doing business here?”

R. Alastair Winn, president of Applied Silicone Corp. in Ventura, said that complex local permitting processes had caused him frustration, and that business and government officials need to look at how this affects biotechnology companies.

“There’s no one who can suck the breath away from you better than the bureaucracy in Ventura,” Winn said.