STUDENTS' FIRSTHAND LOOK AT COLLEGE BIOTECH PROGRAM
Not everyone knows what they want to do once they graduate high school, but with February being National Career Technical Education Month, the city of Vacaville hosted a multi-stop field trip Friday to hopefully spark some ideas.
Because it is Vacaville, home of a quickly growing biotechnology industry, one stop was Solano Community College's Vacaville campus, where many biotechnology careers start.
Professors Jim DeKloe and Michael Silva took 58 Will C. Wood and Vacaville High School students on a tour of the $34 million Biomanufacturing Education Center and discussed the importance that biotechnology plays in people's lives, namely how it can save them.
DeKloe talked about how SCC's biotech program started as a workforce program for Genentech, potentially the first biotech company in the world and which operates a manufacturing center in Vacaville that is one of the city's top employers.
“That is the largest cell culture manufacturing facility in the world,” he said. “When I go to conferences, I travel all over the country. Everyone has heard of Vacaville, California if they're in the biotech field, especially because of Genentech Vacaville.”
DeKloe said Genentech was one biotech center that provided a livable starting wage, the potential for upward mobility and a vital role in health and science.
“They often will make a medicine for a disease for which there is no treatment,” he said. “Before that medicine is invented and manufactured, someone who had that disease would inevitably die. There'd be nothing that medical sci
ence could do for them. At the end of the day, if you work across the street, you are saving somebody's mom. That is part of what makes biotechnology so fulfilling.”
Silva asked students what their goals were in life and what they could achieve by making money, handing out SCC notebooks after they gave their answers. He talked about his background, growing up in a low-income family, losing his father to a heart attack when Silva was 12, his mother getting laid off from American Home Foods and developing breast cancer, graduating from Vaca High and getting enrolled in SCC's biotech program. He later returned as a professor.
Silva talked about what biotechnology companies can create.
“The type of medicine that we teach our students to make, we have to teach students how to grow cells that have the genes to be able to make proteins that can target just those cancer cells or target just the immune cells that are attacking our body,” he said. “Chemotherapy will attack everything in our body, but the medicine that we teach our students how to make, that are made by companies right here throughout our region, are methods to target just that disease cell and leave all the healthy cells alive.”
Other topics taught at SCC include cell and gene therapy, which the school offers certificates for, making it the first institution to do so.
“If you go to Berkeley, Stanford, all those places, they don't have nothing like this,” Silva said. “They all have one room just like this, and it's not for you all coming straight out of high school. It's for people that already have advanced degrees.”
Additionally, SCC offers a bachelor of science degree in manufacturing, one of only 15 community colleges to do so.
“You can get that under $10,000 right now,” Silva said.
One of Silva's students, Elizabeth Wilson, talked about joining the biotech program when she was 14 and what she gained from it.
“I've learned so many important skills ranging from the different techniques in the laboratory (to) how business works,” she said. “I've learned so many things about how cells and life works, about the industry, all the different opportunities that are really incredible.”
In addition to her education, Wilson said biotechnology was vital to her life. A few years back, she was diagnosed with a rare condition called osteochondritis dissecans.
“My body was attacking my cartilage and killing it,” she said. “My cartilage in my knee was completely dead and gone, wiped out, nonexistent.”
Wilson was able to get a matrix-assisted chondrocyte implantation, a form of stem cell therapy, put into her knee, which allowed her to no longer use a wheelchair.
“Without biotech, I would not be walking today,” she said. “It's changed my life fundamentally in more ways than one. Beyond just a career, it's changed my life from the leg up, I guess you can say.”
Silva told The Reporter that students get to tour SCC's biotechnology center often, sometimes doing hands-on activities, other times hearing stories such as Wilson's.
“We really enjoy it because it gives an opportunity for the students to actually see them in a stateof-the-art biotech training facility,” he said.
Silva likes being able to provide outreach.
“I love feeding off our energy off our youth and their aspirations,” he said. “It also helps me understand what their interests are, and as a teacher who's committed towards helping provide a quality education, by being able to better understand where they're coming from, we can constantly service that bridge between the students' interest and the actual career field that will be able to help pay them a livable wage and a career field that truly does make a difference in the lives of others.”
Additionally, the students visited the advanced manufacturing lab at SCC's Fairfield campus, the SCC Aeronautics Center at the Nut Tree Airport, ICON Aircraft, RxD Nova Pharmaceuticals and Wunder-Bar.