Congratulations on another one of your always excellent and much anticipated Special Reports on Biotech/Biomed in your Sept. 18 issue. Thank you also for the several quotes from us you were kind to include.
Several of the section’s articles, plus your Top 25 list of medical device manufacturers, raised points worth addressing:
The annual California Healthcare Institute study released in spring 2000 is a valuable addition to our understanding the economics underpinning the dynamic local medical manufacturing industry. Particularly helpful was the salary information, especially given the lack of relevant correct statistics on the medical manufacturing industry from either the state of California or any federal government agency. Such data can only help buttress efforts by the Orange County Business Council, VenturePoint and other groups to attract and expand new medical businesses in OC.
However, once again, CHI, as did the state and feds in feeble previous estimates, woefully underestimate the correct number of medical product manufacturers. CHI, however well intentioned, would have you believe that OC is “home to 337 biomedical companies with more than 33,000 employees.” These statistics, I am sure, will be quoted repeatedly in the future.
We believe, though, based on almost 10 years of ongoing research and the latest edition of our Medical Industry Directory/Database of S California Companies-2000, that the picture is vastly different. In fact, there are approximately 800 medical product manufacturers of over 100 different categories of products (device, equipment, instrument, supply, drug, biotech, biomed, etc.) in Orange County alone. While the creation of new firms (and net total of all firms) has slowed during the past several years, we conservatively estimate there are well over 50,000 employees at those firms. Happily, even that conservative estimate may actually be way off the mark.
Our database/directory proves and validates that Southern California is indeed the “largest region of medical product manufacturing in the world,” home to approximately 2,500 medical manufacturers. No other similar-sized geographic region comes remotely close,in the U.S. or world. That is one of the reasons we were able to receive a trademark from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for the slogan: “OrangeMed.”
Such claims to fame for our local economy are important to trumpet, and that is my primary reason for writing this letter, in addition to providing our own two cents worth of comments in reply to the Los Angeles Times article (on OC vs. LA and San Diego counties) you so rightly panned in recent issues of the OCBJ.
One of the extreme difficulties for us and others is locating and tracking the new emerging-growth medical manufacturers locally and nationally. It is so much of a problem that the Food and Drug Administration itself recently capitulated and admitted they had lost track of literally thousands of medical manufacturers nationwide, or they never found them to begin with. As a result, the FDA purchased one of our products, our national MS Excel database of medical product manufacturers.
The FDA’s great fear (and rightly so), as we pointed out (to their embarrassment) last year in an exclusive investigative report published on the front page of Biomedical Market Newsletter, is that several thousand medical manufacturers almost certainly have not been inspected for several years. Perhaps worst of all, many of the new ones have likely never been inspected, and for those we have a new nickname: “bandit manufacturers.”
Welcome to the Wild Wild West of the new millennium.
David G. Anast
Publisher/Editor/CEO
Biomedical Market Newsletter Inc.
Costa Mesa
