The relocation of Vermillion Inc.’s corporate headquarters from Fremont, Calif., to Bee Cave is pumping more business into a growing biotechnology arm that stretches from Austin along Bee Cave Road.

The small molecular diagnostics company announced Friday that it has signed a two-year lease on a 5,000-square-foot space in the Triton Center where it will house its CEO, finance, information technology, facilities, administration, and sales and marketing staff that will total about 15 positions.
Vermillion will continue to operate research and development, regulatory and quality operations in California.
Austin’s tech-savvy work force and reasonable cost of living attracted the company to Texas where it is quickly assembling a new staff, said Gail Page, CEO and chair of the board of directors of Vermillion.
Other than new CFO Sandy Gardnier, who was hired in California and is building accounting staff here, Vermillion has hired both IT Director Dan Page and Director of Marketing Scott Henderson from Austin.
“We looked at a lot of places to relocate the company. We looked at the East Coast and Chicago. One of the things that we were able to demonstrate to the board [of directors] is the strong talent pool you can attract to Austin or find in Austin,” Page said. “It was very difficult to get people to move to California.”
Vermillion, founded in 1993 as Ciphergen Biosystems Inc., develops diagnostic tests in oncology, hematology, cardiology and women’s health.
It joins biotech incubator Emergent Technologies, also on Bee Cave Road, in forming a concentration of life science companies eager to capitalize on the forthcoming Lakeway Regional Medical Center and the employees it will attract.
The Milikin Institute named Austin among the top 12 biotechnology and life science centers in the U.S. Clusters of biotech activity serve as a greater benefit to each company than if it were the sole firm in a city.
Austin and surrounding cities also include biotech companies Abbott Spine, Arthrocare, Asuragen, Clinical Pathology Laboratories, Luminex and Zimmer Biologics.
Texas ranks in the top 10 nationally for the number of traditional biotechnology companies located in-state, according to Gov. Rick Perry’s Industry Cluster Initiative.
Vermillion’s relocation comes just over a year after it declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2009 and executives resigned but stayed on as consultants.
“We were like all struggling companies. We hardly had any money,” Page said.
Timothy Sullivan, chair of Austin Chamber of Commerce’s BioAustin initiative that represents more than 100 life science companies in the five-county Austin and Central Texas region, said the fledgling biotechnology companies got off the ground last year through Texas Emerging Technology Fund investments.
The ETF fund invested in small early-stage companies and kept them moving forward while the industry fought the economic downturn.
“The whole industry, as did many others, went through a down period. It was very difficult to raise capital,” said Sullivan, CEO of Mystic Pharmaceuticals. “The high net worth investors waited it out on the sidelines. They became much more risk averse.”
Vermillion bounced back on the strength of the Federal Drug Administration’s clearance last fall of its lead product, OVA1, the first and only blood test cleared by the FDA to help a physician evaluate a woman’s ovarian mass for malignancy prior to a planned surgery.
That clearance helped Vermillion executives raise $43 million in equity in December and launch OVA1 in March.
Quest Diagnostics Inc. and Vermillion entered into a strategic alliance agreement to develop and commercialize up to three diagnostic tests, the first being OVA1.
Vermillion continues to collaborate with various research institutions, including the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Stanford University on future tests.
“Austin’s central location also facilitates more efficient and effective interaction with our national sales force and our strategic partners on the East Coast, such as Quest Diagnostics and Johns Hopkins University, as well as our colleagues on the West Coast, such as PrecisionMed and Stanford University,” Page said. “Those flights all the way across the United States are really killers.”
She said the company believes the time was right to make the move to an area that holds much promise.
“We are hoping this will bring great things to Austin. We’re poised to grow the company,” Page said.
Sullivan said capital streams are starting to flow again and the Austin biotechnology and life science cluster is essential to the smaller, yet innovative, companies ability to attract investments.
“A strong biotech cluster basically enhances one’s ability to go after that funding. Texas is striving to get there but certainly has a ways to go to compete with places like San Diego and the northeast,” he said. “Texas is pushing for that, and the more that this economic cluster can strengthen the more it will attract venture capital into the region.”