are making San Diego something of a nub—if not quite a hub—for an emerging sector of sustainable technologies that use biotechnology to engineer algae, yeast, and microbes to manufacture chemicals without petroleum-based feedstocks. Without including the algae-based biofuels companies like Sapphire Energy and Synthetic Genomics, at least five other companies in this area besides Allylix are focused on industrial biotechnology to produce renewable chemicals: Carlsbad, CA-based Verdezyne, and San Diego’s CP Kelco, Genomatica; Senomyx (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SNMX); and the San Diego-based business units that Cambridge, MA-based Verenium recently sold to BP. (So far, it’s still unclear what BP plans to do with the business units, which are mostly the leftover operations of San Diego-based Diversa that were developing enzymes and cellulosic ethanol fuel.)
The field has been growing fast enough that two California nonprofit life sciences groups, San Diego’s Biocom and San Francisco’s BayBio, have organized the “California Industrial Biotech Conference,” a two-day event in downtown San Diego next month.
Fritz told me that industrial biotechnology was just beginning to germinate in San Diego when she arrived here more than a decade ago to oversee the first of two startup businesses for Dow Chemical. “When I came here in 2000, there was a little,” she said. “But it has grown quite significantly.”
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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