Hawaii Takes a Page from San Diego

Or tries to anyway:

At the time, this sleepy, southern California Navy town was gripped in recession. It depended largely on military funding and with the end of the Cold War, defense contracts were drying up and its future looked bleak. It desperately needed to reinvent itself and it did so brilliantly by morphing from a military/tourism-based economy to a life sciences hub in a matter of two decades.

In short, San Diego can serve as a great role model for Hawaii, and while the Aloha State is nowhere close to San Diego in our evolution as a biotech center, we are on the road.

There are life-sciences companies in this state with potential blockbuster products in the pipeline. Hawaii Biotech, for example, is working on cutting-edge recombinant vaccines for West Nile virus, pandemic flu and dengue fever. Any of these could generate hundreds of millions of dollars or more in sales, and the company is considering a manufacturing facility on Oahu. Our own company, Cardax Pharmaceuticals, is developing a cardiovascular drug that, if approved, could be a major factor in the $30 billion cardiovascular drug market. Other local companies such as Tissue Genesis, Hoana Medical and Cellular Bioengineering are ramping up with leading-edge technologies that also could help put Hawaii on the life sciences map.