Wanted: A biotech company to call Florida home

Wanted: A biotech company to call Florida home

HEALTH CARE by Jean Gruss | Editor/Lee-Collier

Listen to Florida industry recruiters and economic development leaders and they'll tell you biotechnology is one of the industries they'd most like to attract. It's clean, it pays well and it attracts millions of dollars of venture-capital money.

But what does it really take to lure these kinds of companies?

The Review interviewed Susan Desmond-Hellmann, president of biotech powerhouse Genentech, after a recent speech she gave to the Forum Club of Southwest Florida in Naples. Above all else, she says, Genentech looks for brainpower. Without it, her company wouldn't be in business. Bringing great minds together is the key to success; she jokes that Genentech scientists chatting in the taco line at the company's cafeteria is where they'll discover the next great drug.

All that Genentech brainpower has created blockbuster cancer drugs such as Rituxan for non-Hodgkins lymphoma, Avastin for colon cancer and Herceptin for breast cancer. In 2005, Genentech reported $1.3 billion in net income on revenues of $6.6 billion.

Here are excerpts of the interview with Desmond-Hellmann:

Many communities are working hard to attract more biotechnology companies like Genentech. What do you look for when you're considering a location for a new site?

There are two kinds of facilities that the company is likely to have a big capital project in. One is research and development, and the other is production. What we look for is slightly different in each of those, so it's good to think about them a little bit separately.

For R&D, we go where the talent is. We love San Francisco because we're in the middle of Stanford, University of California/San Francisco, UC Berkeley. People who like science and like R&D tend to live in a community like that and they come from those universities. Boston is a favorite site too because of the great institutions of learning. When we talk to companies that are in other places, if they're too far away from a university, that's a challenge for them. I know for example Amgen has decided to branch out from Thousand Oaks [in Southern California] for R&D to Cambridge [Mass.] and Northern California.

In production, we also like to be near where people can go to school. But the kinds of schools may be different. We're big fans of Vacaville, Calif., where our largest biotech production facility is, because Solano County has a local community college with a biotech two-year major. That's terrific for us in getting manufacturing-technology experts. So we need a college education, but we don't need a Ph.D. in molecular biology. So having good universities nearby is just as important for manufacturing.

The other things we look for in manufacturing are: How's the water supply? How's the power supply? Are there good green-field sites to start your building? How close are they to an airport if we send folks from our home office? Will they have accessibility from an airport? Can we transport people there back and forth? For any of the sites, we consider the cost of living. Will we get a good tax base? Is the state business friendly? We've been pretty vocal in California, including an interaction that I had with the Governator, as people call him. You know, Schwarzenegger is great. He's really talked about business a lot. But we've been concerned about the business climate in California not being friendly enough for biotech - or anybody else for that matter. We started to look outside of California for those reasons.

Is the university the most critical part of site location?

I would say it is for us. We're a very science-based company, so for us the heart and soul of what the company wants to accomplish all starts with the science.

Is Florida on your radar?

Florida's not been on our radar. I don't think there's been a tradition in Florida of biotechnology that we're aware of. There's not a lot of biotech in Florida. It's challenging to get started and get a reputation. In the Southeast, the area that people tend to look at is Research Triangle Park around Duke University. I'll tell you in the Southeast we just decided to put a warehouse in Louisville, Ky., because it's a big hub for UPS and that's a great place for us to have a distribution center. So some of it is a little bit of good fortune.

Florida's also a little bit tough on the plane flight. It's hard to get to Florida on one plane flight from San Francisco. It takes two plane flights, and we think about things like that in terms of productivity for our workforce.

So what would it take for Florida to change that?

People get traction when they have a good start, like when they attract one company. We just made a decision to put something in Oregon and Intel has gone there.

So we saw the positive things that Intel saw. So having a starter, having one come and others follow is really important. Putting together a nice package of incentives and tax breaks is very helpful.

The California-based Scripps Research Institute is opening a research center in Palm Beach County. Is that something you would consider a catalyst?

I think that's a very big positive. It just shows that somebody who thought about getting things done has made a commitment and that's helpful.