Petaluma’s Labcon bringing new energy to North Bay life science sector

On the factory floor, an angled robotic arm grabs and lifts high a piece of plastic shaped like a spider’s web, its outer edge ringed with 16 tiny pipette tips that have just been molded from clear resin.

The pipette tips, destined for use in the modern world of automated medical research, represent a fraction of the millions of disposable plastic medical containers and transfer devices that are manufactured each day at Petaluma’s Labcon and similar facilities in Northern California.

The Bay Area manufactures half the world’s pipette tips, Labcon President Jim Happ said.

The slender, pointed tips will be used in medical research machines that automatically draw and place a measured amount of liquid into “multiwells,” today’s miniaturized, mass version of the test tube. As many as 1,536 multiwells can fit on a plate the size of a smartphone.

Labcon’s revenues now total about $35 million a year, Happ said, but “I think we can become a $100 million a year company.” That would delight local economic development officials, who already are celebrating the company’s success in helping attract a key new ingredient for the region’s life-science sector: a facility to sterilize the pipette tips and other medical devices made here.

Next year, U.K.-based Synergy Health is scheduled to open its first “electron beam” sterilization facility in Northern California at one of Labcon’s two sites in Petaluma. The facility, similar to two that Synergy already operates in San Diego, would use the radiation of high-energy electrons to sterilize millions of devices already enclosed in their packaging.

Life science contributes roughly $6.5 billion to the combined $60 billion economies of Sonoma, Marin, Napa and Solano counties, said Sonoma State University economics professor Robert Eyler. And economic development officials believe it is a sector with great potential.

“Life science is basically the North Bay’s tech play frontier,” said Eyler, who has studied the sector as chief economist for the Marin Economic Forum. Life science, he said, offers more opportunity for growth here than more traditional technology companies.

Already the sector employs nearly 9,000 workers at 400 businesses in the four counties, according to the North Bay Life Science Alliance, which formed this June to promote the industry. Some of the work is overseen by such major players as Minneapolis-based medical device maker Medtronic, with facilities in Santa Rosa, and Genentech, owned by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG, which operates a biotech manufacturing plant in Vacaville.

Now officials are looking forward to the coming of the “e-beam” facility operated by Synergy Health, a global leader in sterilization with 5,600 employees worldwide.

“Having it here is just one more notch in our holster,” said Dick Herman, president of 101 MFG, a group of manufacturing executives in Northern California.

The facility is slated to open in April, Synergy said in an August press release. With it and a similar facility slated for Saxonburg, Pa., the company would have the world’s largest network of sterilization facilities for customers in Europe, Asia, South Africa and the Americas.

The company’s website states that in such facilities, the radiation is kept enclosed by a shield of concrete eight to 10 feet thick.

The Synergy facility would employ about 20 workers, according to the local life science alliance. But its greater significance would be the manufacturing that it would encourage here.

“There’s a lot of growing business for what Synergy does,” said Chris Stewart, the alliance’s chairman and CEO. Sterilization is “absolutely critical” for many of the medical devices made here.

The Bay Area this year ranked second, behind Boston, among the nation’s communities with life science clusters, according to investment management firm Jones Lang LaSalle. But the vast majority of the work here is concentrated in the Peninsula, South Bay and East Bay. Eyler acknowledged the North Bay sector is “dwarfed” by business in the rest of the Bay Area.

Nonetheless, the alliance is seeking to build a bigger cluster of such companies here.

Already it has identified 100 South Bay life science companies whose leases are coming due in the next two years, ?Stewart said. Economic development officials intend to pitch the businesses ?on the value of the North Bay. And they are hoping that a sterilization facility would provide one more reason to move up here.

“Synergy will attract other companies in this sector,” said Carolyn Stark, executive director of Sonoma County BEST, a job creation program.

The alliance was begun with the help of $292,000 in funds from the city of Novato. But officials from the four counties have joined the effort.

“We see the benefits to the larger area,” said Ingrid Alverde, Petaluma’s economic development manager. When new companies like Synergy come to the region, “it’s good news for everybody.”

Last week came news that Ohio-based infection-prevention company Steris has agreed to buy Synergy for $1.9 billion. The deal is anticipated to close by March 31.

A Synergy spokeswoman on Thursday declined comment about whether the planned acquisition would have any impact on the proposed new facility in Petaluma. But Labcon’s Happ said, “I ?fully expect the project to be moving forward.”

The new Synergy facility would end Labcon’s current practice of sending three full tractor-trailer rigs around the state in order to obtain sterilization for roughly 60 percent of the products that the company makes.

“The beauty of the sterilizer is it will cut our transportation cost to next to nothing,” at least for sterilizing, Happ said.

Founded in Marin County, the 55-year-old Labcon today is owned by Helena Laboratories of Beaumont, Texas. The company remains competitive here because of its continued adoption of automation.

“The difference really is the robots,” Happ said.

Ten years ago, he said, the company made 1 million parts a day with 200 workers. Today it makes up to 6 million a day with about 220 workers.

Just as the manufacturing process has become more automated over the decades, so has the research that relies on Labcon’s products, said Linda Newman, the company’s chief operating officer.

For drug discovery or genome testing, she said, “it takes a long time to do all that testing, so they have machines.”

For such research, the pipette tips and other tools must be sterile or “you just wasted months of work,” said Scott Weitze, a Labcon scientist who tests the products to ensure their cleanliness.

To Weitze, the manufacturing process remains striking. Just think, he said, how difficult it is to do anything “a million times in a row and not mess it up... That’s almost a magic trick to me.”

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit.