06/19/2006 Biogen’s Community Lab Hopes to Lure Kids Into Science

San Diego Business Journal

Biogen’s Community Lab Hopes to Lure Kids Into Science
By KATIE WEEKS - 6/19/2006
San Diego Business Journal Staff

Local biotechnology companies are reaching to a surprising place to secure the future of the industry from advancing global competition — San Diego County youth.

As reports conducted by Ernst & Young and others show, biotechnology companies in European and Asian countries are improving their bottom lines, gaining interest from investors and popping out on public stock exchanges.

But local firms think they’ve found at least part of the answer to keep the United States, where students tend to lag behind the rest of the world in math and science, one step ahead.
At Biogen Idec Inc.’s “Community Lab,” seventh graders from San Diego County school districts sporting white lab coats and too-big goggles analyze DNA samples alongside professional scientists. In the first full year of the Community Lab, the world’s third largest biotech company, with 400 employees in San Diego, welcomed 1,000 San Diego County students from 20 schools into one-day teaching labs that coincide with curriculum approved by the San Diego County Office of Education.

Middle school is typically when students begin to lose interest in science, and studies show that’s partly due to the drop in the number of field trips that show them how science fits into the real world, said Nancy Taylor, science coordinator at the San Diego County Office of Education. Taylor said while San Diego students test on par with the rest of California, the state as a whole generally falls behind the rest of the country.

“California is pretty close to the bottom,” she said.

So Taylor beamed when Biogen Idec came to her a little more than a year ago with the proposal of an all-expenses paid opportunity to spur interest in scientific careers while students are at an impressionable age.

Biogen Idec spent about $250,000 to build the 1,300-square-foot Community Lab when it constructed its San Diego campus in 2004. San Diego employees focus on research for Rituxan, a cancer medicine that generated $1.57 billion in 2004.

The firm spends $150,000 in annual operating costs for the Community Lab program, said Annie Glidden, Biogen Idec’s manager of education and community outreach.

“Hopefully (students will) move on to getting a science degree, and work in the biotech industry,” Glidden said. “We hope to affect at least a few kids in a strong way.”

Older Students Targeted, Too

The Cambridge, Mass.-based mega-biotech is not alone. San Diego’s Invitrogen Corp. and about 30-40 other local life sciences firms participate in a Biocom/San Diego Workforce Partnership program called the Life Sciences Summer Institute that targets high schoolers and college students. The selective program, about to begin its second summer, provides a free one-week introduction to biotechnology adapted from a course taught at Miramar College, as well as free training on the industry — and a stipend — for high school teachers.

The institute then places students, including high schoolers, who complete the training at biotechnology companies as paid interns for the remainder of the summer.

Biotechs employ the interns in mainly laboratory positions, though some of them work in the marketing or public relations departments. A few interns, said those who oversee the program, have been asked to come back for another summer.

Invitrogen will both donate supplies for the training and host a research and development intern this summer, said Lisa Peterson, who oversees the company’s community relations division.

“Part of our interest in science education is to inspire the next generation of scientists,” Peterson said.

The institute costs about $300,000 to run, said Mark Cafferty, chief operating officer at San Diego Workforce Partnership, a nonprofit. Cafferty wrote the grant application that garnered $2.5 million from the U.S. Department of Labor as part of the U.S. President’s High Growth Job Training Initiative.

The summer institute is funded partially from the federal grant and also through money from another major biotech, Thousand Oaks-based Amgen Inc.

The remainder of the federal grant will be used for other projects including a life sciences job resource Web site the San Diego Workforce Partnership is developing, Cafferty said.

Dreaming Bigger

These industry groups’ and biotechs’ efforts are in hopes of increasing the number of students majoring in science. For a biotech region like San Diego, where most of the companies are homegrown, educating youth on the practical applications of science is important, industry members said.

Kortni Stafford, a life sciences teacher at Jefferson Middle School in Oceanside, said the Community Lab program enabled her students to dream bigger.

“Students don’t see that they can be a scientist for a living,” said Stafford, who has had 60 of her students participate. “They say, ‘I want to be a football player,’ but they don’t think, ‘Oh, I want to help find a cure for HIV.’ These aren’t typical jobs to them because their parents don’t do that.”
Stafford said at least three of her students have “seriously” added biotechnology to their list of possible career fields, and that the science club membership at the school has doubled since students completed the Biogen Idec program.

All Eyes On Europe

The news makes biotech companies here happy because reports like the Ernst & Young paper show Europe and other countries are gaining on the United States.

According to the 2006 report, called Beyond Borders, venture capital funding and initial public offerings dropped last year for America’s biotechnology industry when compared with 2004. While the number of IPOs in America plummeted by 61 percent last year, Europe saw a 92 percent increase in the same time period. Canada saw an 89 percent increase.

Similarly, while the U.S. drug development market got 6 percent less funding from venture capitalists, Europe saw a 20 percent jump.

America still leads the way in revenue generated by biotech firms and the number of biotech companies. The U.S. had more than twice as many public biotech companies as Europe in 2005.

The United States spent far more on research and development in 2005 than other regions of the world examined in the report — nearly $16 million compared with $3.2 million in Europe, $852,000 in Canada and $312,000 in the Asia-Pacific region.

Tipping The Scales

While the numbers may seem overwhelming, Biogen Idec’s Glidden said she believes the Community Lab “can make a difference,” by pulling the experiments out of the textbook and into the real world.

Students in the Community Lab are asked to decipher if a person’s genetic make-up would allow them to tolerate a cancer medication. Some of the DNA used in the lab represents people who could not use the medication because of their inability to produce an enzyme needed to tolerate it.

Students break for lunch and play sand volleyball, and when they return, it’s time to view the DNA samples under an ultraviolet light.

“This is pretty exciting to a seventh-grader,” said Taylor, of the office of education. “They can see it with their own eyes.”