Sacramento lands new biotech plant — and it’s $80k jobs. Could more be on the way?

Officials of biotech company Orca Bio announced Thursday morning they will be opening a 100,000 square foot manufacturing plant near Sacramento International Airport next year to build cell therapy products designed to replace patient’s diseased blood in leukemia and other cancers.

The plant in Metro Air Park, off Interstate n5, should be operational in the first half of 2023, company officials said, but full-scale manufacturing is dependent on the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the company’s cell therapy product.

The plant’s announcement is a potential boast to efforts by Sacramento area officials to build Sacramento into a bio-tech hub. That said, Thursday’s announcement focuses on bio-tech manufacturing, not the bio-tech corporation headquarters or research and development arms that officials hope to attract.

It will also be another business to locate in Metro Air Park. The industrial office park was first proposed in 1973, but it was just acres of vacant land for years.

Metro Air Park growing

In 2017, Amazon opened a 855,000 square feet fulfillment facility, the first development at Metro Air Park.

The park also contains a 1.13 million sq ft distribution center for Walmart and a 600,000 sq ft distribution center for consumer goods company SC Johnson.

Orca Bio, a late-stage start-up, already employs around 50 people in a smaller 10,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Tahoe Park East, but its corporate headquarters are in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley.

Barry Broome, president and executive director of The Greater Sacramento Economic Council, said the Orca Bio announcement is positive because the manufacturing jobs being created, will be high-tech and higher paying, likely in the $ 80,000 range to start.

He said bio-tech companies couldn’t locate those jobs in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, because employees could not afford to live in those communities, but they can live in lower-cost Sacramento.

More biotech jobs to come?

He said Orca Bio’s announcement will be the first of several in coming months about bio-tech companies opening new ventures in the Sacramento area, but he was not more specific.

In February, community leaders and UC Davis officials broke ground on a $1 billion, 8-acre life sciences campus called Aggie Square that they hope will reshape Sacramento’s reputation as merely a government town and transform it into a biotech hub.

But most of the tenants for the $1.1 billion project have not been announced.

It’s common in the competitive bio-tech industry for companies to build manufacturing plants even before government approval of their products.

What Orca Bio makes

Orca Bio is currently conducting a final phase, known as a Phase 3 study, in its efforts to prove that its Orca-T cell therapy is effective for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia, acute lymphocytic leukemia and other syndromes.

Potentially, dozens of workers would be employed at the new Sacramento-area plant, but just how many is unclear.

Jeroen Bekaert, Orca Bio’s co-founder and chief operating officer, in an interview, did not offer an exact number of employees that will work in the plant.

But he said since the company currently employs around 50 people in a smaller 10,000 square foot facility, the number of workers in a 100,000 square foot facility would be much larger.

Bekaert said the facility would be able to produce 3,000 cell therapy products a year. He said construction began in August 2021.

Bekaert said Orca Bio’ s approach uses precision cell selection technology to identify the small fraction of all 100 billion donor cells that potentially contain therapeutic benefits for patients.

He said the cells are then manufactured into potentially curative cell therapies designed to maximize efficacy of treatment and significantly limit treatment-related risks.

Helping patients without them developing serious side effects will be key to the success of the Phase III trial.

Some cell therapies side effects for other companies’ products have included patients suffering new tumors or developing neurological issues.

Roots in stem cell technology

Orca Bio began operations in 2016 based on research from the laboratory of stem cell pioneer Dr. Irv Weissman at Stanford University. The start-up company has received around $300 million in financing from the venture capital community.

The location of the company’s new manufacturing facility in Metro Air Park is no coincidence.

The park is four miles from Sacramento International Airport, which company officials say will allow quick shipment of the cell center products to transplant centers across the U.S.

Orca Bio said cell products from its existing facility in Tahoe Park East were all delivered in less than 72 hours and the majority in less than 60 hours.

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This story was originally published September 8, 2022 at 4:00 AM.