Company Is Working to Put ‘Biotech Beach’ on the Map
A Bay Area online media outfit is pressing harder to make its brand name stick for Southern California’s bioscience industry--”Biotech Beach.”
This week, Synergistic Media Network Inc. of San Francisco, is launching a free Web site for investors that tracks stocks of 50 SoCal firms under the banner “Biotech Beach Hotbed.” It’s also releasing the latest edition of its brand-name poster--a map of the region dotted with cartoons representing headquarters of companies paying to participate.
Of course, Biotech Beach is hardly a household name, even though Synergistic published its first map of the region four years ago. But Tim Fredel, its chief executive, isn’t fazed. “It just takes awhile for names to catch on,” he says.
Fredel hopes the new “BioSpace Investor” site (www.investor.biospace.com) will make Biotech Beach common parlance among individual online investors. The site cost about $35,000 to develop and Fredel seeks advertising from online stock trading firms.
Two-thirds of the Biotech Beach companies on the stock monitor have headquarters in San Diego County, home to more publicly traded biotechs than the other Southern California counties put together.
The list also encompasses many outfits to the north, such as tiny Techniclone Corp. in Tustin, industry wunderkind Amgen Inc., in Thousand Oaks; and diagnostics giant Beckman Coulter Inc., in Fullerton. Even Illinois-based Baxter International Inc., which has sizable operations in Southern California, is included.
The 50 companies are part of a national list of 400 industry stocks also tracked by the site. The site can be accessed through Synergistic’s main site for industry users--”BioSpace” (www.biospace.com).
“We’re doing a lot with our Web site that’s helping reinforce the [Biotech Beach] name,” adds Fredel.
Synergistic began promoting names for various industry hotbeds in 1989, when it published its first poster for Bay Area biotechs. The company dubbed the region “Biotech Bay,” attempting to craft an identity distinct from the computer industry’s wildly popular “Silicon Valley.”
Synergistic will kick off the new Web site and SoCal poster at an industry event Thursday at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Posters sell for $25 apiece; T-shirts, $15; and a box of postcards, $10.
This year’s poster depicts 25 bioscience companies, two less than the last edition two years ago. Fredel attributes the drop to a price increase for participants. This year, the cheapest buy--a one-inch cartoon of a headquarters building--costs $3,600, $1,200 more than last time.
Dropouts include Cortex Inc., the Irvine developer of experimental treatments for brain disorders. Vincent Simmon, Cortex’s chief executive, didn’t see fit to contribute this time around, noting that “[Biotech Beach] is resonating at a pretty modest frequency as far as I’m concerned.”
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Barbara Marsh covers health care for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7762 and at barbara.marsh@latimes.com
