A recent forum hosted by BioscienceLA, a Culver City not-for-profit focused on fostering innovation in the local bioscience sector, included a hefty dose of international politics.
One of the invited speakers at this May 30 forum was Ofir Akunis, Israel’s minister of science and technology. The speech was billed as an opportunity to share the perspective of the Israeli government on transitioning from “start-up nation,” to “scale-up nation.” Los Angeles County was chosen as the site for this speech because of the history of local companies collaborating with Israeli businesses. And because Israel has a strong life science industry cluster, a bioscience forum was chosen as the optimal place in Los Angeles County for the speech.
But then Israeli politics intruded. Protesters from a group called UnXeptable showed up at the event, according to an account in the Jewish Journal. UnXeptable is a group of Israeli expatriates that recently formed to oppose an initiative from the Israeli government coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year to weaken the Israeli judiciary. After weeks of massive protests inside Israel, the Netanyahu government in late March shelved the proposal. But some protests continued after that decision.
When he learned of the protestors at the BioscienceLA event, Akunis, who is of course a minister in Netanyahu’s government, decided not to participate in the forum. According to the Jewish Journal account, Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, Hillel Newman, told the BioscienceLA forum attendees that Akunis had told him he felt that his prescence would further provoke the protestors and that he didn’t want to “bring a bad feeling or bad vibes to anything associated with him and the state of Israel.”
BioscienceLA Chief Executive David Whelan told the Business Journal that other diplomatic attendees and elected officials already present stepped in to continue the forum event.
“Cosmin Dumitrescu, Consul General of Romania in Los Angeles and dean of Los Angeles Consular Corps, already in attendance, delivered some remarks on L.A.-Israel collaborations and opportunities,” Whelan said.
Other speakers – including Culver City Mayor Albert Vera and Jacob Segal, executive board member of the Southern California Israel Chamber of Commerce – also addressed the topic.
Whelan said that there was no additional disruption of the event schedule from the protestors. He stressed that planned networking time before and after the speeches took place as originally intended.
Nonetheless, this was an unusual occurrence for BioscienceLA, which was founded in 2018 “to serve as an innovation catalyst for life sciences in the greater Los Angeles region, accelerating the growth of funding, space, and talent.”
The organization launched with seed money from Los Angeles County government as well as some of the largest bioscience and medical players in the region, including Thousand Oaks-based Amgen Inc., Beverly Grove-based Cedars-Sinai Health System, Duarte-based City of Hope and commercial developer-turned-philanthropist and life sciences industry booster Richard Lundquist.
BioscienceLA set up its office in a 20,000-square-foot space in an old courthouse building in Culver City and has used the space as what it calls a “collaboration hub.” It has launched intership and leadership catalyst programs, as well as numerous forums, training programs and incubation/coworking space.  All of the programs are aimed at boosting startup life science companies in the region, providing them with the resources and training to develop and then bring their products to market.
BioscienceLA has also established annual programs, including L.A. Biotech Week and L.A. MedTech Week.
And BioscienceLA formed a partnership with UCLA Health to launch a program called TechQuity, in which BioscienceLA subsidizes student interns from historically under-represented backgrounds to work at startups in an accelerator program administered by UCLA Health.
In April, BioscienceLA and Avenda Health Inc., which has developed an artificial intelligence-driven platform that maps and analyzes cancer tumors, inked an agreement in which Avenda is the anchor tenant at BioscienceLA’s Culver City office space. Avenda had been a tenant at the office space for two years prior to this agreement – the first major tenant at BioscienceLA.
