S.F. biotech has je ne sais quoi for French development agency

A Parisian economic development agency is opening an office near San Francisco's Mission Bay in hopes of forging alliances between Bay Area and Paris area biotech, high-tech companies and universities.

PRIME, the Paris Region International Mission Enterprise, will open its first office in the United States Nov. 30 to connect investors, researchers and tech-driven companies in the Paris region to the Bay Area.

PRIME's office, at 2415 Third St. near the University of California at San Francisco's Mission Bay campus, will be used to not only market the Paris area as a European base for Bay Area companies, but will also allow French companies collaborating with local companies to have temporary work space as needed.

"Paris and the Bay Area are the leaders in innovation, life science and discovery," said Regis Baudoin, CEO of Paris Region Economic Development Agency, PRIME's parent organization. "The partnership is a natural fit."

A French delegation of business leaders, government officials and educators will jump start PRIME's efforts in the Bay Area with a visit to Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing and Stanford's robotics lab followed by trips to the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research or QB3.

Frederic Le Roux, CEO of PRIME, said the Paris region boasts 850 research labs, an educated workforce and, of course, Paris itself. In addition, the organization will assist Bay Area companies with recruiting workers, obtaining tax exemptions and selecting sites.

Paris is a sister city of San Francisco and the two regions already have ongoing biotechnology collaborations. Among those is one between the French gene-analysis company ExonHit and the Bay Area's life science tools company Agilent, collaborating on the development of next generation gene analysis tools.

"It is a place where we are starting to emphasize our technologies more now because there is a lot of research funding there and we are interested in working with leading scientists," said Kevin Meldrum, director of marketing for Agilent's genomics business. "It does open a door for us to expand our presence in Paris and generally in France, and we are putting a lot of emphasis there."

Other Bay Area biotechs operating in the Paris region include Genentech, Applied Biosystems, Genencor International and Gilead Sciences.