Celera to Move Headquarters To California, May Spin Off

Celera, the Rockville biotech company that scientist J. Craig Venter founded to map the human genome, announced yesterday that it will move its headquarters to Northern California.

Applera, Celera's parent firm, said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it is pursuing a possible spin-off of Celera, which would be a separate, publicly traded company.

Celera will keep offices in Rockville, where about 30 employees will remain, a spokesman said.

Celera's move follows a busy 2007 for Montgomery County's biotechnology industry, in which several companies were scooped up by the world's largest life-sciences firms.

Roche bought BioVeris for $600 million.

AstraZeneca grabbed MedImmune for $15.6 billion.

And late last spring, Digene was acquired by Qiagen for $1.6 billion.

The billions of dollars worth of biotech deals have turned many Montgomery County entrepreneurs into millionaires and energized the Interstate 270 corridor, but it has also shifted control of the region's homegrown biotech community to bigger companies in other parts of the country and overseas.

Richard Zakour, executive director for the Tech Council of Maryland/MdBio, an advocacy group for Maryland's technology industry, said he was not surprised by Celera's announcement.

"Obviously we would like to have more corporate headquarters here, but these things happen in business," he said. "Celera's move to California has been going on for awhile. There hasn't been anything covert or secretive about it."

Zakour said most of the biotech companies purchased over the last few years still have a significant presence in Montgomery County.

Celera was founded in 1998 by Venter, who mapped the human genome. The company initially tried to sell the information it gathered to other researchers, and it eventually turned a profit. But with the federal government offering the data free, the business model did not present a prospect for long-term growth.