Calif. high schools groom biotech workers (What programs do we have or can we develop in Montana?)

The East Oakland, Calif.,
teen and a few of his
friends have enrolled in
training programs to
become biotech
manufacturing technicians.

Brendan Doherty Courier Contributor Biz Journals.com

Fresh out of high school,
Barry Miem will spend the next
year shadowing some of
the 140 people at
Hayward, Calif.-based
Baxter Bioscience. He
earns $8.50 an hour, and
this internship sets him on the road to earning $28,000-$34,000 a year as a
manufacturing technician.

"I like the labs," said Miem, 19, who helps keep cell cultures alive as they
cook and cure. "Once I was in there, I knew I wanted to be in biotech."

Miem is one of 170 students in a biotech manufacturing vocational program
operated by two East Bay, Calif., high schools, Berkeley Biotech Education
Inc. and Laney College in Oakland.

Students begin their biotech careers in the
11th grade with summer internships in
science. After graduation, they commit to
one-year stints at biotech firms and begin
the associate’s degree program at Laney.

"You need to have more than desire to
work in this field," said Adi Mohanty,
manager of Baxter’s antibody development
plant. "It’s not turning nuts and bolts, it’s like
managing the environment for a patient in a
coma. The number of people who can do
this is small."

Baxter and the other companies in the program — including Chiron Corp. in
Emeryville, Calif., and the Berkeley-based units of Bayer Corp. and Sygen
International PLC — hope to develop the specialized people needed for
biotech manufacturing.

Nearly 80 manufacturing job openings jostle for attention at online boards at
such companies as Fremont, Calif.-based Abgenix Inc., Berkeley-based
Xoma, South San Francisco-based Genentech Inc. and more. Expansions by
Abgenix, Genentech and Foster City, Calif.-based Cell Genesys Inc. (140
manufacturing jobs by 2004 alone) contribute to the growth of such jobs.

"Our students don’t see themselves going to a four-year school because of
financial constraints," said Mary Alice Rathbun, interim executive director and
founding executive director of Berkeley Biotech Education.

CSU Hayward has turned out 200 people ready for research work since
beginning its program in 1986.

"There are a number of community colleges that have evolved programs to
meet the needs of biotech, and there are more jobs than can be filled in the
work pool," said Steven Benson, chairman of the biology department and
director of CSU Hayward’s biotech program, the oldest in the Bay Area. "It’s
grown, and the opportunities are there."

After all, despite a seemingly endless stream of unsuccessful or delayed
product news, the industry marches on.

A report released by the Economic Development Alliance for Business
painted a rosy picture. The Bay Area sports the world’s largest biotech
cluster, and the large biotech companies will grow 12 to 15 percent per year,
with bigger biotechs growing 23 to 28 percent per year.

"This isn’t a mature industry, so the future is a guess," said Robert Sakai,
technology and trade director of EDAB. "Much of the hype late last year was
driven by people who needed something to replace telecom or technology.
They may not have been wrong, but it’s just a matter of time. It will happen,
but it doesn’t take six months, it takes years."

Many Bay Area companies with fewer than 100 employees need more
qualified manufacturing technicians as they slow their expansions to preserve
cash flow. While startups need scientists to develop drugs, mature biotechs
and smaller biotechs have pared down to their most promising drugs and need
manufacturing employees to make such drugs in escalating amounts.

At bigger companies like Genentech, Chiron, Abgenix, Cell Genesys and
Foster City-based Gilead, larger numbers are needed for later-stage programs
nearing the FDA finish line.

"As we move into manufacturing, and few of them are there now, there will be
more needing that manufacturing presence," said Sue Markland Day, director
of the Bay Area Bioscience Center.

Even if a handful of the nearly 200 small biotech companies net a successful
drug therapy, the winners can mushroom from 10 employees to 200 in just a
few years.

"What I’ve seen is that they grow dramatically," said Sam Doctors, CEO of
Advancing California’s Emerging Technology, an Alameda-based biotech
incubator.

Not every biotech story ends well.

Students who began studying a relatively new field, bioinformatics — using the
computer to find genes for drug discovery — have found that upon exiting
school, the entire field collapsed.

Oakland-based DoubleTwist folded, Celera and Incyte Genomics moved to
drug development and others have left the field entirely.

As the bioinformatics field developed, the CSU Hayward program saw its
program grow from its genesis in autumn 2000 to its current 40 students.

"Whether they will have opportunities when they graduate will be unclear,"
said Benson.

For other schools, the development of curricula is a chicken-and-egg
problem. The jobs are there in the industry, but course development takes two
years.

"There must be a closer relationship between the industry and the schools, but
that means that the schools are not in charge of the curriculum," said Sakai.

http://www.bizjournals.com/industries/health_care/biotechnology/2002/08/19/cincinnati_focus7.html