Utah's great for life sciences, summit panelists conclude

Brice Wallace

Utah’s life sciences got plenty of love at a recent industry summit in Salt Lake City.

A panel discussion about achieving success in the life sciences field was sprinkled with Utah kudos from several company CEOs, who lauded both the industry and the state’s abundance of talented workers.{mprestriction ids="1,3"}

“For medical device, I think this community is great,” Vicki Farrar, CEO of Salt Lake City-based medical device company Light Line Medical Inc., said at the Wilson Sonsini Entrepreneur & Investor Life Sciences Summit at the University of Utah.

“Virtually every employee and independent consultant, most of them are in Utah. It’s our clinical advisory board and those types of consultants that we’ve gotten worldwide, not just here, but the engineers, the microbiologists, the techs, the CFO types, etc., have all been local, and it’s all been by word-of-mouth. I haven’t used a recruiter. I have simply asked people who would be good. … It’s just a nice way to proceed.”

“Utah is an excellent place to find people with backgrounds, in my case, in diagnostics,” added Greg Critchfield, CEO of Salt Lake City-based Sera Prognostics. “There are superb people here. If you look my management team, a large number of them have cut their teeth on other companies and have joined us from Utah. … I think we have a great pool of people here. The universities are putting out graduates that are very adept and a lot of people that we use in our laboratory we bring in, we train them, they’ve got a great background, but they need to learn how we do it. So we’re well-served by the community here. You get it from wherever you need it.”

Denali Therapeutics, based in the Bay Area of California, will hire more than 50 people in Utah during the next year as it builds a biotherapeutics manufacturing facility in Salt Lake City. CEO Ryan Watts called it “an incredible place to be.”

“I think this is a fantastic area to continue to grow,” he said. “The Bay Area is amazing, and that’s where we were founded. The battle for talent there is intense, and we think there is an incredible potential of talent here in Utah for us to continue our efforts. …”

A couple of panelists indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in new ways to recruit workers and advanced technologies that allow companies to benefit from work-at-home and hybrid employment models. Watts said Utah does not have the same therapeutics environment as in the Bay Area of Boston, but his company can hire the best talent it can from throughout the world. Denali has hired some Californians to work in Utah, but Utah and Salt Lake City have been welcoming to his company. “We want to really recruit talent from Utah,” he said.

Denali performed evaluations of several places for its biotherapeutics plant, including Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Texas and California.

“We looked at all the various regions, and, frankly, hands-down, Utah was the most friendly,” Watts said. “It does help that I have a home here. …. The biggest risk for us is the talent, very specifically biotherapeutics manufacturing. We knew that we could build the facility for half the price, and maybe even less, than we could in California. We could work with lawmakers and cities and states to be able to get the permits, which is a big challenge in California.”

Utah wants to “solve big problems,” recruit great talent and “raise up” its own talent pool, he said.

“This is a great place to work,” Critchfield said. “There is a pool of people here that you can build companies with. You don’t need as much capital, you can build things much more efficiently than on either coast, although our housing prices are rising very quickly here right now. But I think, for me, it’s really the ability to find people here. … Utah is a great place to find people who are entrepreneurial and want to build something.”

On a personal note, Watts said, after founding Denali, he found himself spending half of his time on airplanes. Getting to Boston or New York City is faster from Salt Lake City than it is from San Francisco.

“Actually, that flight is terrible. San Francisco to Boston, if you have a headwind, it’s like eight hours,” Watts said. “It’s terrible. … This is an incredible place and it’s actually very easy to get to any city from Salt Lake City, more so than from San Francisco….”

Farrar said she and her husband decided to remain in Utah because it is “entrepreneurial-friendly.” For example, issues with licensing at the university level have been resolved without lengthy negotiations, she said.

Still, she lamented that for her last two companies, nearly all of the funding came from outside Utah. “And that’s just too bad,” she said. “I’d like to have not just the talent here but the investors here as well.”

However, Watts said his company has investors from all over the world, including Singapore, Scotland, Alaska and New York.

“Of course we want to raise capital outside of Utah,” he said. “We should no longer excuse ourselves from being from Utah. This is a global world. Let’s get capital wherever we can get it and do great science,” he said.

“I think the biggest driving force is, let’s make sure that we don’t have cases where we’re not doing the highest-quality work. And that will speak for itself, it will drive value, and the globalization will allow you to raise capital anywhere.”

The annual summit was presented by BioUtah, BioHive and the University of Utah PIVOT (Partners for Innovation, Ventures, Outreach & Technology) Center.{/mprestriction}