San Diego’s Biotech Leaders of Tomorrow: ‘We Are the Wildcatters’

biologics perspective, San Diego probably outperforms” the comparable per capita indices in San Francisco and Boston, he said.

“For me, San Diego has a fundamentally different feel” than either San Francisco or Boston, said Suria, who has lived in both places. “It feels a whole lot less consolidated and a whole lot more fragmented. Maybe you can take that as a negative if you don’t have a big anchor institution…But actually I think fragmentation is helpful from a drug discovery level. You get a lot more innovation if people are not sitting on the exact premise and approaches and logic that are used within Genentech [in South San Francisco] or at Biogen Idec in Boston… There are plenty of smart people here, and they are forced to innovate new tools and new approaches, and I don’t think that happens as much in San Francisco and Boston.”

San Diego already has become a capital for industrial biotechnology, according to Cellana CEO Martin Sabarsky. “No other area in the world has the same concentration of algae-based biotech companies as San Diego,” Sabarsky said. “There’s Sapphire Energy, Synthetic Genomics, Cellana, General Atomics, Verenium. When it comes to algae—which really is a platform technology that’s kind of going to transform fuel, feed, and nutrition—we have a very disproportionate share of the deals and funding.”

UCSD Campus and Torrey Pines Mesa

Attendees said bringing together San Diego’s academic, biotech, and computer science sectors could accelerate innovation in emerging fields with high growth potential, such as health IT, wireless health, and bioinformatics. Venture capital funding also can be invested more

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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.