A medical equipment development company has recently moved from New York to Santa Clarita in order to tap into its biomedical sector and skilled workforce. For the past couple of years, Palyon Medical Corp. has been headquartered in a 4,000-square-foot space in New York City. At the site, its employees have researched and tested an implantable drug delivery pump – which has not yet reached the market – designed for treatment of chronic pain, spasticity and other neurological diseases. However, the company’s leaders decided last year to move somewhere with better building infrastructure options and a stronger base of skilled workers in its industry. Just a couple of weeks ago, the company packed up and moved across the country to a 5,000-square foot space in an office park at 28368 Constellation Road in Santa Clarita. Luis Malave, Palyon’s CEO who just joined the company in September, said Santa Clarita beat several other cities that were under consideration, including Boston, Minneapolis and Austin, Texas. In California, the city was chosen over Pasadena, Orange County and the Silicon Valley area. “The best technical expertise and the best infrastructure for this type of business was here in California, in the Southern California area,” Malave said, adding that the focus was eventually narrowed down to the northern Los Angeles County corridor. “There are a lot of biomedical entities out here (in Santa Clarita), which creates that atmosphere that we needed. But also, the cost of doing business up here was also very competitive.” The new site gives Palyon about 4,000 square feet of office space and about 1,000 square feet of lab space. It is also dramatically cheaper than the company’s former site. Palyon’s hiring Malave was joined in the move by two other managerial staff members, four engineers from the former New York office and one engineer from Palyon’s subsidiary company located in Germany. The subsidiary, Palyon Medical GMBH, develops the key technology used in the company’s product. In recent months, Palyon has hired four new employees from the northern Los Angeles County area, bringing the U.S. employee count to 12. The positions were those in the areas of program management, mechanical, software and quality engineering. Malave said Palyon plans to hire two to four more employees for the Santa Clarita office by the end of the year. Within three years, the company is expected to have about 50 employees at the site. The company’s leaders are hoping to bring Palyon’s first product to market within the next two years. Palyon is Santa Clarita’s most recent addition to its burgeoning biomedical sector, which city officials say benefit the area. “It brings additional high-paying jobs, biomedical jobs, to our community,” said Laura Biery, an economic development administrative analyst for the city. “It also shows that we’re continuing to see growth in areas other than retail in our community, and we continue to see business locating here because we are really business friendly.” Growth industry The biomedical sector is one of four growth industries the city has poured efforts into spurring in recent years. The other three are film, technology and aerospace. There have been other additions to the Santa Clarita biomedical scene the past couple of years. Last year, Quest Diagnostics merged with Specialty Labs and moved its headquarters to a building on Avenue Crocker in Santa Clarita. In 2009, Advanced Bionics consolidated its Valencia corporate headquarters and its Sylmar manufacturing headquarters, bringing 350 Sylmar employees to Santa Clarita. In 2008, Australian-based Cellestis, which makes medical diagnosis and scientific research products, opened its U.S. headquarters in Santa Clarita. Besides the existence of a biomedical industry cluster in Santa Clarita, Biery said companies are also likely attracted by the area’s highly educated workforce. Other biomedical companies located within the city include MannKind Corp. and Boston Scientific.
