The 101 Biotech Corridor has sprung up over the past quarter century in the region around biotech giant Amgen Inc.’s Thousand Oaks headquarters. It now encompasses more than 40 companies stretching from Camarillo on the west to Woodland Hills on the east. At the center of the action for nearly all that time has been Brent Reinke, chair of the BioScience Alliance and an attorney in the life sciences practice of the Newport Beach law firm of Stradling Yocca Carlson and Rauth; he is based in the firm’s Westlake Village office.
Prior to joining Stradling in 2021, Reinke spent 16 years as a partner in the Westlake Village office of downtown Los Angeles-based law firm Musick Peeler and Garrett, where he built up its biotech practice.
Initially, Reinke helped scientists departing from Amgen set up their own companies. In 2008, he founded the BioScience Alliance, which aims to help grow the bioscience industry along the 101 Corridor.
The Business Journal sat down with Reinke to discuss his longstanding efforts to boost the 101 Biotech Corridor.
How did you first arrive on the scene around what would become the 101 Biotech Corridor?
I’d been practicing in the Thousand Oaks area since 1999. In about 2005-2006 (right after joining Musick Peeler), I was approached by several Amgen scientists and researchers. They were seeking to negotiate better contracts to join other firms or to start their own firms, often near the Amgen campus that they knew.
Why was that?
By that time, Amgen was becoming more of a big-pharma company (2005 revenue of $12.4 billion) and understandably less entrepreneurial. Some of the people there had enjoyed the more entrepreneurial focus and began looking for greener pastures.
What prompted you to set up the BioScience Alliance in 2008?
Earlier in my career, I had worked with scientists at the Los Alamos (National Laboratory) in New Mexico and with scientists at Rockwell Scientific Co. I learned that scientists were brilliant people, but often lacked the experience to grow and start companies. They needed a support ecosystem to facilitate the development of companies. I looked at the area around Amgen and nearby where a few other companies had started setting up shop and saw there was nothing there in terms of a support ecosystem. So that’s why I started the BioScience Alliance – mainly to provide education and networking opportunities for these companies.
Then what happened?
The timing worked out – at least for the alliance. In late 2007, Amgen announced a major round of layoffs (up to 2,600 jobs cut, or 12% of its workforce at the time). This provided even more intellectual talent coming out of Amgen all at once: these scientists were motivated to move on to whatever their next steps in their careers would be.
But you soon learned more was needed than just education and networking for these scientists eager to launch their own ventures.
Yes, over the next three or four years, we had to come to grips with several issues. There was no wet lab space in the area for scientists to work with liquid solutions to develop their drugs. Venture capitalists were telling startup companies to locate closer to established bioscience clusters where they (the venture capital firms) already had offices. And, despite the talent coming out of Amgen, there was a perceived lack of local talent pool for the purpose of taking companies through the growth process.
How did you and the alliance start to crack the venture capital nut?
We learned that it takes one or two successful startups to essentially say, ‘No, this is where we are going to be.’ That’s what happened with the first great success story of the corridor: Kythera, a biotech company started by an ex-Amgen C-suite executive, Keith Leonard. They told their potential investors that they were not going to move: ‘If you want to invest, you have to do it here.’ They went public in October 2012 and then sold themselves to (Dublin, Ireland-based) Allergan for $2.1 billion in 2015.
Why was that so crucial?
What Kythera did from a perception perspective: They proved you could build a successful life science company in the 101 Corridor region – beyond Amgen, of course. That was a proof of concept. And then, after the sale, some of the executives that had been with Kythera went on to start their own companies in the region. So now you had two companies seeding the corridor with startups. Also, this prompted the venture capital community to take notice.
But there were still other transformative milestones to come.
The next big inflection point was in 2018 with the founding of Westlake BioPartners by Beth Seidenberg and Sean Harper, who was the former head of R&D at Amgen. They are a life-science venture capital fund and homegrown, being located on the corridor and with the principals living in the area. Seidenberg and Harper had also seen what was starting to happen in the area. Their initial fundraise was $400 million and they have raised about $1.2 billion overall to date.
Why was this so important?
That did two things: it brought a ton of outside attention to the region and the firm started investing in companies located in the region.
Earlier this year, another startup announced its presence in the 101 Biotech Corridor: Latigo Biotherapeutics, which was spun out of Westlake Village BioPartners and came out of the gate with $135 million in funding. Is this a model going forward for launching companies along the corridor?
Having a venture capital firm located on the corridor is beneficial to further growing the life-science cluster here, and I note that, eventually, there may be enough of a critical mass of life science companies to convince other life science-oriented VC firms to have a presence here. But I am confident that we will see continued growth in the corridor even if no other life science funds physically locate in the area.
What else has happened to jump-start the 101 Biotech Corridor?
Over the last few years, Alexandria Real Estate Equities (a Pasadena-based real estate investment trust) started buying buildings and retrofitting them to accommodate life-science companies. Alexandria invests in major life-science clusters across the country – in San Francisco, San Diego, Boston, etc.
Then a couple of years ago, (Boston-based) Charles River opened a lab and vivarium (animal-testing facility) in Thousand Oaks, which started to address that other key shortcoming I mentioned earlier: the lack of wet lab and testing space along the corridor. A few other wet labs have opened here since.
What do you see coming next for the 101 Biotech Corridor?
Until now, companies have been scattered along the corridor from Camarillo to Woodland Hills. There’s been no central hub to house startups. But that is about to change. Alexandria (the REIT) recently bought two buildings from Amgen across from Amgen’s campus in Thousand Oaks. They tore the buildings down and have now permitted a 300,000-square-foot life sciences campus with wet lab space. They are waiting for an anchor tenant to commit. This would be the first major-scale biotech campus in the region to house multiple companies.