According to reporting by Ron Leuty of San Francisco Business Times UCLA has joined into a partnership with German drug maker Evotec SE, Palo Alto Samsara BioCapital, and family fund KCK Ltd. to launch the Autobahn Labs virtual incubator. The novel incubator is based on the concept of a bridge model to fast-track early-stage academic research into startup companies.

The 2020 Life Science Industry Report produced by BioCom finds that in Los Angeles County the industry provides 195,820 jobs (direct, indirect, and induced) and economic activity of $44.2 billion in 2019. For the state of California, the life sciences industry provided 1.4 million jobs and $372 billion in economic activity.

BioLabs LA, celebrating its one year anniversary, is now home to 20 companies and 59 resident scientists that share lab equipment with an estimated value of $1.5 million. According to journalist Howard Fine, reporting in the Los Angeles Business Journal, “companies at BioLabs LA incubator have raised $31 million in the past year to fund R&D.”

According to Carmen Gosey from the Office of LA County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, “nineteen high school students from Compton Manuel Dominguez High School graduated from the Bio-Flex Pre-apprenticeship program, created to expose and offer high school and college students’ hands-on experience at a Bioscience company. The program is a flexible, yet structured career pathway for the next generation of Bioscience workers in LA County. So far, more than 75 students have graduated from the Bio-Flex program after being placed with companies such as Takeda, Oak Crest Institute of Science, Protomer Technologies, and Pasadena Bio Collaborative Incubator.”

Bloomberg Hello World journalist and best-selling author Ashlee Vance showcases the California biotech startup Curative, which has been working throughout the COVID-19 crisis to significantly increasing testing capacity for the region.

Biocom's Return to Work Task Force has established a partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (OES) to provide free-of-charge PPE to companies who qualify as essential businesses.

According to Amy Stulick, reporter with San Fernando Valley Business Journal, the Terasaki Institute, a Los Angeles biotech nonprofit, plans to transform the former Weider Health and Fitness Center in Woodland Hills into a biomedical research and development facility. According to a statement from Terasaki, the two-story, 50,000-square-foot building at 21100 Erwin St. will be designed to accommodate teams of scientists focused on developing bioengineered systems, medical devices and other products with biomedical applications.

According to UCLA, a team of researchers from the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and peer institutions has been awarded a $5.75 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to study the correlation between obesity, inflammation and pancreatic cancer. The scientists hope their findings may help people avoid getting this cancer.

The Bio Revolution is a powerful new wave of innovation that is expected to transform business and society beyond healthcare, according to a recent McKinsey article by Michael Chui, Matthias Evers, and Alice Zheng. The applications and economic impact of these new biotechologies, their analysis suggests, will be far reaching - into agriculture, food, materials, energy, and consumer products and services. “The likely disruption of the Bio Revolution is vast and poised to influence a wide range of industries.”