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California is a life sciences mecca. Home to one-third of the nation's biotechnology companies with over 5,400 businesses and academic research institutions employing 236,000 workers, California has more biotech jobs than all of the other states combined, including the world's largest: Amgen and Genentech. The San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego and Los Angeles all rank among the top biotech centers in the nation. The state leads the way in funding for biotechnology research.
Advanced technology is big business for the Golden State. Producing more than $150 billion in goods and services, California’s high-tech industry employs over a million workers. The state realizes a large consumer market for biotechnology, electronics, software, agriculture, and entertainment. It attracts more foreign direct investment than any other state, has a highly-skilled labor force, and remains the country’s foremost agricultural producer.
The University of California (UC) has an extensively affiliated network of life science research organizations. The UC Discovery Grant program, with more than 300 participating companies, awards life science research grants to foster relationships between UC researchers and California businesses and to position the state for continued international competitiveness in the evolving industry. The Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) aims to integrate the quantitative sciences with biological systems at all levels of complexity, while the Center for Integrative Genomics at Berkeley endeavors to uncover the mechanisms responsible for evolutionary diversity. The UCSF Center for BioEntrepreneurship works to transfer discoveries from the laboratory to actualization for the benefit of institutions and society.
Research institutions include the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology - Cal-(IT)2, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), the DOE Joint Genomics Institute (JGI), the UC Davis Genome Center, the UC Irvine Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, the UCLA Center for Bioinformatics, the UC Riverside Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, the Riverside Biotechnology Impacts Center, the San Diego Biomedical Genomics Microarray Facility (BIOGEM), the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, and the Santa Cruz's Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering. The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, one of the country's largest, private, non-profit research organizations is a world leader in understanding the basic structure and design of biological molecules.
In 2004, California voters passed an initiative to spend $3 billion on human embryonic stem cell research, side-stepping federal restrictions on funding, with the hope of positioning California as a world leader in embyronic stem cell research. The initiative includes creation of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine which will dispense $300 million per year for ten years to research institutions.
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