products coming through development, we can add manufacturing lines, or buildings, so it’s relatively modular.” The cost is yet-to-be-determined, but it will be “well over $100 million,” he says.
“Shire made a substantial investment in acquiring us, and now they’re making another substantial investment in building us out,” says Rakin. In five to seven years, he adds, “We want to be a billion-dollar part of Shire. That absolutely is the goal, to build the leading player, or one of the leading players, in regenerative medicine.”
Biocom CEO Joe Panetta says he regards regenerative medicine as a diverse and growing sector, and part of San Diego’s future in life sciences. “The average biotech company in San Diego has 50 employees, so [Shire’s] expansion is big from a jobs standpoint,” Panetta says. “They would be in an upper tier of large companies, but below the thousands that CareFusion (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CFN]]) and Life Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]) have.”
The region has a half-dozen emerging companies like Stem Cells and International Stem Cell, and Panetta also sees a growing cluster of basic stem cell research in San Diego. The Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine opened this year as a partnership between The Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, U.C. San Diego, the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology, the Salk Institute, and the Scripps Research Institute.
In laying out Shire’s strategy, Rakin described Dermagraft as Shire’s “flagship product” in regenerative medicine. So part of the strategy involves looking at other
