April 29, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Integrated DNA Technologies will be hiring at least 10 people at its newly built facility in Redwood City, Calif., with the expectations it will hire around 10 more per year as it continues to build out its new 8,000 square foot Center of Excellence, the company told BioSpace Wednesday.
IDT’s new building houses state-of-the-art labs that will focus on the company’s custom oligonucleotide manufacturing capability. Chief Commercial Officer Stephen Gunstream told BioSpace the center’s Bay Area location will be key to its continued success.
“The Redwood City Center of Excellence for Research and Development will allow us to develop complete solutions for cutting edge applications in next generation sequencing, synthetic biology, and other molecular biology technologies,” Gunstream told BioSpace.
IDT said its new team will work closely with the R&D department at its main manufacturing headquarters in Coralville, Iowa. Together, the teams in Redwood City and Coralville will build out the company’s commercialization of xGen NGS target enrichment products and gBlocks Gene Fragments.
“Most of the products we manufacture are used in scientific research,” said Gunstream. “Our Redwood City site allows us to combine our unique capabilities in custom nucleic acid manufacturing with the innovative and progressive talent located in the Bay Area. We see continued investment in this facility and in this area over the next 10 to 15 years.”
As part of the announcement, IDT said it had hired Caifu Chen as senior vice president for Research and Development. Chen has 25 years of genomics research experience in the academic and biotech sectors, particularly in developing qPCR- and NGS-based assay products for research and diagnostics applications.
“I’m very excited to join the Redwood City team,” said Chen. “We built this new facility for two reasons: One, to have a presence in the Bay Area, which is the worldwide center of the biotech industry. Second, we want to attract top talent that will develop innovative, robust solutions for NGS and qPCR. Robust products equal happier customers. This is our goal.”
Gunstream added that although the number of additional new hires for this facility will be limited in 2015 because as IDT is recruiting scientific and product development leaders, the Redwood City site will eventually become a major R&D hub for IDT.
“The Bay Area is a special place, arguably the biotech capital of the world. Many of our key customers are located here, and there is also a high concentration of thought leaders in genomic research,” said Gunstream. “The opportunity to collaborate is vital to IDT’s growth. We are within minutes of major academic institutions, such as Stanford University ; University of California, Berkeley (CAL) ; and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), from which we can draw on talent to push the boundaries of technology.”
That network will give IDT and extended timeframe to put down roots in the area and build out what has already proven to be a successful, thorough pipeline and customer base—particularly in the area of manufacturing.
“For more than 25 years we have invested in and developed our custom manufacturing capabilities. This facility will allow us to build upon that and allow us to evolve with our customers’ research. For example, NGS is changing the way we look at biology today,” Gunstream told BioSpace. “Basically, it provides a new way to discover incredibly valuable information. The face of cancer is changing completely because we are learning a whole lot more by NGS. We aim to be a key player in this space and we think the custom nature of our business suits it very well. We can actually enable people to discover more by providing the tools that make the process a lot easier. Our Redwood City facility is key to this future success.”
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