When Grant Bitter left Amgen more than a decade ago to start his own research company he considered going to either San Francisco or San Diego. For family reasons Bitter remained in the Conejo Valley although in retrospect getting his company BitTech off the ground would have been easier in those other cities where more activity, networking and collaboration takes place in the biotech industry. Bitter expected that his former employer, a major player in the global industry and the largest biotech company in the Los Angeles region, would create an atmosphere similar to that found in those other cities. As it turns out, Bitter can count on one hand the number of other companies competing in the biotech space in the 101 Corridor. “I expected there to be more start ups and more activity,” said Bitter, who operates his lab in Westlake Village. Los Angeles is synonymous with the entertainment industry and even after the major hit taken with the end of the Cold War and loss of government contracts, aerospace, and even manufacturing in general, remain a strong presence in Los Angeles County. Biotech in Southern California, on the other hand, barely registers and the emergence of clusters of companies as found in San Francisco and San Diego has not materialized. In a 2004 study on the industry, Milliken University ranked San Diego as the number one biotech cluster in the U.S. The Los Angeles-Long Beach area ranked 10th. That same study defined a cluster as a concentration of competing or collaborating firms and their related supplier network. It isn’t enough to just have one or two big companies researching new drugs or developing medical devices but a true cluster includes the entire chain “from supplies to end products,” according to the study. So why hasn’t a biotech cluster developed here and is it too late to get one off the ground considering the competition from San Diego and San Francisco? The door had been open about 20 years ago for clusters to take root here but new drugs didn’t stay in the region once the research ended, said Ahmed Enany, president and CEO of the Southern California Biomedical Council. The City of Hope hospital developed a drug that was later commercialized by Genentech, one of the largest of the Bay area firms. Research out of CalTech also found its way north to get into the marketplace, Enany said. “If we had taken care of keeping them here and spinning off you would have had commercial activities based on this technology,” Enany added. The absence of a Los Angeles cluster is the topic of an ongoing study by Steven Casper, an associate professor at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in Claremont. The data collection stage of the two-stage study has been completed and Casper now moves to interviewing biotech industry professionals. So far Casper identified three areas contributing to biotech clusters university research, a labor pool and availability of capital. “One mechanism to get a cluster is to marry good science with experienced managers from a local company,” Casper said. Late entry While Los Angeles area universities can compete with those in San Francisco and San Diego, their late entry to secure patents on research puts them behind those other institutions. While venture capital firms investing in biotech has improved of late, many of those firms that had been in Los Angeles gravitated south, Casper said. One area of particular interest to Casper is how the lack of mobility between companies results in the failure for clusters to take hold. In San Francisco, for example, this high mobility leads to social networks linking companies together. Such a network is practically non-existent in Los Angeles. “Dense networks within a cluster of companies can lead to the quicker diffusion of important technological advances and market intelligence, creating a regional advantage of sorts,” Casper wrote in an article published at online science magazine BioTech360. In a presentation in January at Stanford University, Casper showed that while 25 senior managers (16 percent) left Genentech to start new companies, only 4 senior managers (3.5 percent) left Amgen to pursue other opportunities in the industry. In the same presentation, Casper gave figures that of the 170 instances of workers leaving a Los Angeles biotech firm, an overwhelming majority of them 88 percent were moves out of the city. In the case of Amgen, an abundance of money created a corporate culture that people did not want to leave, unlike Bay Area companies that had multiple comings and goings among the workforce. The layoffs that took place last fall after Amgen hit the financial skids were not viewed as a bad thing by Casper. “You need a bit of turbulence and to shake things up to develop the capital and human resources markets,” Casper said.

MAGNOLIA PARK , Ten years ago, Wayne Thornton never had a problem finding a parking spot near his store. But now, the general manager of Norcostco Costumes, and his customers are having trouble finding spaces, something he blames on the popular Porto’s Bakery next door. “Porto’s took away all of our front parking,” he said. “It’s been quite congested. We’ve definitely seen less people coming in.” For the full story visit http://www.burbankleader.com/articles/2008/04/24/news/blr-parking26.txt

The federal government has offered Los Angeles County $213 million to convert carpool lanes to special, congestion-pricing toll lanes on three freeways, according to county government documents. The freeways involved first would be short stretches of Interstates 10 and 210 in the San Gabriel Valley, and then, if any money remained, part of the 110 south of downtown Los Angeles. The federal funding, however, would come to L.A. County only if local and state transportation officials agreed to the changes, which are highly controversial in the region, where most motorists expect “free” freeways. For the full story visit http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-congestion24apr24,0,4120857.story

Michael Brodsky has been named as the new president and CEO of online wagering firm Youbet.com. Brodsky has served on the Youbet board of directors since June 2007 and became board chairman in February, a position he retains. Brodsky replaces interim CEO Gary Sproule who is resigning from the company. Sproule replaced former CEO and President Charles Champion in December. Due to the appointment, Brodsky resigned from his seat on the board’s audit committee sand was replaced by director Jay Pritzker.

Performance test systems manufacturer Ixia had a weak first quarter noted by a sales drop in Canadian and European markets. Still, the Calabasas company narrowed its loss from a year ago with a net income of $106,000 on revenues of $41.7 million. For the first quarter of 2007, the company had a net loss of $759,000 on revenues of $40 million. The company had lower than expected shipments to Europe and Canada in the first quarter but those were partially offset by record sales to the Asia Pacific region, said Ixia President and CEO Atul Bhatnagar. “We were also encouraged by the sequential increase in shipments to network equipment manufacturers, led by higher sales to Cisco Systems,” Bhatnagar said. Shares of Ixia closed up at $7.28.

Inability to deliver product on time to its customers contributed to power conversion manufacturer Power-One Inc. posting a net loss for the first quarter. After announcing April 10 that revenues and earnings fell short of expectations, the Camarillo-based company took steps to fix manufacturing and supply chain problems. “We have already launched initiatives to accelerate the transfer of manufacturing to lower-cost areas and are implementing new sales and operations planning processes,” said Power-One CEO Richard Thompson. For the quarter ending March 30, the company reported a loss of $13.6 million on revenues of $117.8 million. That is a greater loss than the $12.3 million on revenues of $124 million for the same period in 2007. Shares in Power-One closed up at $3.30.

The Screen Actors Guild and major Hollywood studios have agreed to extend their contract talks another week in a sign that the two sides are making some, albeit limited, headway in their negotiations toward a new three-year agreement. Studios had initially planned to begin negotiations with SAG’s sister union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, this coming Monday if they couldn’t hammer out a new agreement with SAG after two weeks of negotiations. For the full story visit http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-sag24apr24,1,6853594.story

Net income for pharmaceutical manufacturer Amgen increased a sluggish 2 percent for the first quarter when compared to a year ago. The Thousand Oaks-based company saw both its domestic and international sales slip by 3 percent and 1 percent respectively. Taking changes in the exchange rate into consideration, however, international sales increased by 10 percent for the first quarter when compared to last year. The company still expects to reach its stated earnings guidance for the year, said Kevin Sharer, chairman and CEO. “We continue to be encouraged by the lasting effects of our cost management efforts,” Sharer added. For the quarter ending March 31, Amgen reported a net income of $1.14 billion, or $1.04 per diluted share, on revenues of $3.6 billion. For the same period in 2007, the company reported net income of $1.1 billion, or $0.94 per diluted share, on revenues of $3.7 billion. Shares of Amgen closed down at $42.40.

BlueFire Ethanol Fuels Inc. hired Brinderson to engineer and construct a biorefinery in Lancaster. The 3.1 million gallon facility will produce cellulosic ethanol from green waste materials. Irvine-based BlueFire is one of six firms receiving money from the U.S. Department of Energy to build ethanol production facilities. The Lancaster facility will be the first commercial scale roll-out of BlueFire’s proprietary concentrated acid hydrolysis process.

Sinking home values and the collapse of flimsy mortgages fueled a record number of foreclosures in California in the first three months of this year, dimming prospects for any quick recovery in the housing market. The number of homes lost to foreclosure rose to a record 47,171, more than four times as many as a year earlier. Default notices — the first step toward foreclosure — were sent to owners of 110,000 California homes from Jan. 1 to March 31, according to La Jolla- based DataQuick Information Systems. That’s about 1.4% of the homes in the state. For the full story visit http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-foreclose23apr23,1,1517773.story