85.7 F
San Fernando
Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Valley Firms Featured at Conferences

Biotech companies in the San Fernando Valley participated directly or otherwise in multiple Southern California industry conferences this past month.Southern California Biomedical Council in Los Angeles held its three-day conference over Whova, a platform that allows participants to break into smaller virtual presentations, while Biocom’s “Bioscience State of the Industry in L.A. County” was held on Zoom.Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. Chief Executive Bill Allen emceed Biocom’s virtual event, which focused on various biotech clusters in the county, including those in the Santa Clarita Valley and along the 101 Corridor.Shannon Sedgwick, director at the institute for applied economics at LAEDC, showed several snapshots of hubs in the bioscience industry in Los Angeles.

Santa Clarita’s cluster accounted for 6,500 of the region’s jobs in 2018, with employment growing by more than 6 percent over the previous five years, Sedgwick said. Between 2018 and 2023, LAEDC’s research indicates 500 more bioscience jobs will be added to the mix.The average wage for jobs was more than $75,000, with a wage premium of over $10,000 across all segments of the industry.Medical devices and diagnostic equipment and research services accounted for the largest share of bioscience employment in Santa Clarita, Sedgwick found.“Bioscience employment has been growing and bioscience real wage growth has been outperforming average real wage growth across all industries,” she said of the Los Angeles area, with many biotech workers deemed essential, producing personal protective equipment for health care workers and companies working on vaccines as well as other treatments for COVID symptoms.Arcutis Biotherapeutics in Westlake Village gave a presentation focused on immune-modulated skin disease on the second day of SoCalBio’s conference, given its focus on developing topicals for psoriasis and atopic dermatitis.“What we’ve seen in (the dermatology) sector is there has been a lot of M&A activity in the last 10 years, which has really left a dearth of companies doing innovative research,” said Dr. Patrick Burnett, chief medical officer at Arcutis. “Arcutis was formed with the concept of producing either best in class or innovative topical dermatology by going against validated biological targets.”Burnett went into detail about the company’s four topicals in the pipeline, being developed to treat seven different conditions.Dr. Philip Tagari, vice president of research at Amgen Inc. in Thousand Oaks, gave the keynote speech on the conference’s third day.Tagari’s presentation, “Digital Transformation and Drug Discovery,” highlighted advancements made with the digitization of drug development data, and hangups that occurred along the way.

Featured Articles

Related Articles