Rush Is on to Train Technicians

When CoCensys, an Irvine-based biotechnology firm, decided to spin off a separate company, executives advertised for new hires locally and in San Diego.

“We got four responses locally and 45 or 50 from San Diego,” said CoCensys Chairman and President F. Richard Nichol.

Nichol initially hoped to keep the new company, Cytovia, near the parent corporation and UC Irvine, where he’s served on various advisory committees. But Cytovia board members, including the venture capitalists who put up $10 million for the start-up, decided to go where the prospective employees were--in San Diego.

“The most important factor was a critical mass of skilled labor,” Nichol said. “You don’t want to hear about delays because of skilled labor problems.”

For the biotechnology industry to flourish in Orange County and Greater Los Angeles, it will have to develop its own labor pool, according to Nichol and others.

There’s no problem in finding scientists with doctoral degrees. There is a sizable surplus of PhDs in the life sciences, the result of a sharp increase in graduate students in recent decades without a comparable growth in available jobs, according to the National Research Council.

The shortage is among scientists with practical skills, the people who make up the core work force of an emerging biotech company--the technicians, lab assistants and mid-level professionals needed to keep a production facility going or to carry out the day-to-day operations of a research lab.

A number of educational programs are trying to fill this gap in Southern California--part of a strategy to encourage the growth of biomedical businesses locally. These efforts are playing an important role in strengthening an economy that lost skilled jobs with the decline of the aerospace industry.

“There’s an avalanche of new discoveries coming out of the biological and medical research laboratories,” said Henry E. Riggs, president of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, a new school affiliated with the Claremont Colleges. “We feel that higher education in America hasn’t come to grips with the need to translate those developments into practical products and procedures, so our focus is on the practice side.”

The Keck school will open next fall with an inaugural class of 30 students in a two-year master’s degree program. “We’re hoping to attract people maybe a few years out of school, working in pharmaceutical or medical devices or an allied industry,” said Bonnie Busenberg, director of planning and administration at Keck. “Some will be straight out of college, looking to kick-start their careers.”

The faculty will include a mix of academic and industry scientists--a marriage of the theoretical and the practical--teaching at first in a converted lab once owned by biomedical giant Johnson & Johnson.

Initially, the focus will be training professionals in the use of computers in drug discovery, Busenberg said.

San Diego State University has begun training specialists in another specialized area--dealing with the federal regulators who make life-or-death decisions over new drugs, medical devices and diagnostic tests, which cannot be marketed without Food and Drug Administration approval.

The first class of 14 students enrolled this semester on the San Diego campus, but the program is scheduled to make several courses available to students online next fall. Among the first crop of students, all have industry experience and one has a doctorate in molecular biology, said Robert Wang, associate director of the university’s new Center for Biopharmaceutical and Biodevice Development.

“All the instructors are industry professionals,” Wang said.

The only comparable program in regulatory affairs is in Philadelphia, he said. California companies often recruit experienced specialists in the ins and outs of drug and device approvals from the East Coast, where many of the large pharmaceutical firms have their headquarters. “In the first year, a company can spend $200,000 to get an experienced regulatory affairs person here.”

A number of community colleges have developed programs to train the technicians needed by the biomedical businesses.

East Los Angeles College, aided by a grant from the National Science Foundation, started a program for 20 high school seniors and 15 college students a year ago.

“The purpose is to train students so they will be employable in the biotech firm or the biomedical area,” said Carcy Chan, who holds a doctorate in medicinal chemistry and heads the program.

At Moorpark College in Ventura County, Maureen Harrigan, a PhD who once did research at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, helped launch a program to teach skills to meet the needs of local biotech companies, like Baxter International’s Hyland Immuno division and Amgen Inc., both of which have facilities in Thousand Oaks. The program, now in its second year, has won grants from the National Science Foundation and job training programs.

Moorpark students learn biotech techniques at a manufacturing facility on the Cal State Northridge Ventura County campus in Camarillo.

“All the courses are completely hands-on,” Harrigan said. “If you just watch somebody do something, that’s not good enough.”

Of the first crop of 12 students, five already had university degrees--two of them master’s. Several have moved into jobs in the $25,000 to $35,000 range; others have transferred to four-year programs.

At UC San Diego, in the heart of a major biotech cluster, the campus’ extension program offers about 30 classes in a program geared for those who work or are seeking jobs in the industry.

The program began five years ago in an effort to retrain aerospace industry scientists and engineers for jobs in biotech manufacturing, said UCSD’s Derry Connolly.

“This is the high end of the continuing education market,” Connolly said. Most of the students have bachelor’s degrees and many have doctorates. “They’re asking the question, ‘What do I have to do to make myself useful for the biotech industry?’ ”