Bioscience Los Angeles County Inc., an industry catalyst organization founded six years ago through the efforts of county officials, has rebranded as BioscienceLA and taken on industry veteran Stephanie Hsieh as its new leader.
BioscienceLA also has a newly renovated headquarters inside an old courthouse building in Culver City, thanks to $15 million in county funding.
It’s all aimed at boosting the reach and capabilities of the organization, which is seeking to make Los Angeles County a global leader in the life sciences.
“We aim to bring economic and societal benefits through bioscience to all Angelenos,” said Hsieh, who is the group’s interim chief executive.
Hsieh joined BioscienceLA a few months ago. She formerly was executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of statewide industry trade organization Biocom. Before that, she was the chief executive of biotech company Meditope Biosciences.
Hsieh has been tasked with re-energizing BioscienceLA, expanding its initiatives and raising the funds to make that possible.
“L.A. is now a hodge-podge of bioscience mini-clusters,” Hsieh said, referring to the generally small clusters of companies in Pasadena, along the 101 Corridor in western Los Angeles and eastern Ventura counties, Westwood/Santa Monica and the South Bay. “We need a new story line to put the image out there of Los Angeles County as a single bioscience mega cluster. And you do that by tying everything into one destination, including the supporting ecosystem.”
Unlike Biocom, the Southern California Biomedical Council and other local industry associations, BioscienceLA was intended from the outset to take a holistic approach to developing the bioscience sector in Los Angeles County.
“The focus is not just on bioscience companies, but on the entire bioscience community,” Hsieh said. “And that means, among other things, creating partnerships with local high schools and universities to interest students in the bioscience field so that we can grow the future workforce.”
The organization started in 2018 with $6 million in funding – the largest chunk of that coming from the county.
One of the biggest county champions of BioscienceLA is Second District County Supervisor Holly Mitchell.
“Los Angeles County is an emerging hub for biotech innovation,” Mitchell said. “We are committed to working with BioscienceLA and other community partners to ensure that the family-sustaining wages, life-long career pathways and opportunities for entrepreneurship within the bioscience industry are accessible for residents – especially for communities that have historically been shut out of these opportunities.”
While the county has poured in that additional $15 million for the courthouse building renovations, fundraising from other institutions and the private sector has been sporadic in recent years, Hsieh said.
“I was brought in to reverse that,” she said.
Hsieh said she is in the midst of raising funds to establish wet lab space inside the old courthouse as well as an incubator and what she calls “grad space” for companies that have moved beyond their infancy but do not yet have the resources to lease their own space. That grad space would come with wrap-around services for tenant companies.
“There really is no place in Los Angeles County right now that has this grad space and it’s desperately needed,” Hsieh said.
