Comstock's magazine 0620 - June June 2020 | Page 80

VACAVILLE & SOLANO REGION
building a
Biotech Hub
Available land and an educated workforce has made
Vacaville an attractive place for biotechnology companies
by Jessica Laskey
Since its founding in the 1800s, Vacaville has been known
for its rich soil and agricultural production. But another
kind of production has made Vacaville an internationally
recognized hot spot in recent decades: biotechnology.
Vacaville landed its first biotech company, Biosource Technologies
(later renamed Large Scale Biology Corp.), in the late
1980s, according to Jim DeKloe, professor of biological sciences
and biotechnology, and director and founder of the industrial
biotechnology program at Solano Community College. The city
parlayed that success into attracting multinational biotech firm
Chiron Corporation (later acquired by Novartis and then Eli Lilly)
and then leveraged that into attracting pharmaceutical company
ALZA Corporation (later acquired by Johnson & Johnson).
All of this activity allowed the city to pitch Genentech, a
DNA-technology pioneer, and it opened its 100-acre Vacaville
technical operations facility in 1998.
“Getting Genentech was a game changer for the Vacaville
economy,” says Tim Padden, economic development manager
for the City of Vacaville. By landing what Padden calls “the
80 comstocksmag.com | June 2020