Daily Business Report-Feb. 5, 2021
Quidel’s SARS Antigen Test for COVID-19
Quidel opens new manufacturing plant in Carlsbad
to produce rapid antigen tests for COVID-19
Quidel Corporation announced the opening of a new manufacturing facility in Carlsbad that will be dedicated to the production of Quidel’s popular QuickVue line of products. The 128,000-square-foot facility will be the company’s highest-volume production plant in the world and begins operations in the second half of 2021 with a mission to produce 600 million QuickVue SARS rapid antigen tests per year for the detection and diagnosis of COVID-19 infections.
Quidel plans to install multiple manufacturing lines at the Carlsbad facility and hire approximately 400 new employees with a mission to scale Quidel’s operations from 50 million QuickVue tests per year to 50 million tests per month at full capacity, including non-COVID-19 diagnostic assays currently in-market or under development. The company is actively hiring to fill open positions including engineers, chemists, technicians, manufacturing, purchasing, sourcing and support services.
Quidel received Emergency Use Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its QuickVue SARS Antigen Test for COVID-19 in December. The company’s lateral-flow technology is visually read by the user and provides results in 10 minutes from nasal swab samples.
“The opening of our massive new QuickVue manufacturing plant is our boldest move yet and is expected to provide Quidel with the scale necessary to serve the needs of communities and institutions for frequent testing now and for years to come,” said Douglas Bryant, president and CEO of Quidel.
Goodyear Ventures invests in autonomous
San Diego-based trucking company TuSimple
Goodyear Ventureshas added San Diego-based TuSimple, a global autonomous trucking technology company, to its investment portfolio.
TuSimple operates self-driving trucks out of its facilities in Arizona, Texas, China, Japan and Europe using an ecosystem made up of digital maps, strategic terminals and an autonomous fleet operations system. Driven by a mission to increase safety, decrease transportation costs and reduce carbon emissions, TuSimple is developing a commercial-ready Level 4 autonomous driving solution to transform the logistics industry.
Last year, Goodyear, based in Akron, Ohio, announced a strategic partnership to provide tires and tire management solutions to TuSimple’s Autonomous Freight Network, the world’s first autonomous network. As an AFN partner, Goodyear will conduct wear studies to better predict maintenance, understand tire longevity and reduce the carbon impact of fleets.
San Diego’s Workiz partners with HR and payroll
leader Gusto to help home service businesses
Workiz, a San Diego company that serves small to medium-sized companies with management services, is partnering with Gustoto help service professionals such as appliance repair specialists and carpet cleaners, overcome challenges associated with payroll, employee benefits, and HR management.
“Workiz’s integration with Gusto changes the entire way home and field service businesses track employee hours and process payroll,” said Workiz CEO Adi (Didi) Azaria. “Automatically synced data will help business owners cut the endless hours invested in payroll and avoid compliance risks and costly data entry errors.”
Gusto offers a simplified, automated payroll solution with tax filing and benefits management to facilitate compliance and team success. When integrated with Workiz, home service business owners will be able to sync employee data and time tracking to process payroll quickly and painlessly, according to Azaria.
Santee company’s power amplifier packages
play key role in NASA’s Mars rover missions
Santee-based StratEdge Corporation, designer and producer of high-performance semiconductor packages for microwave, millimeter-wave, and high-speed digital devices, announced that its SE20 power amplifier packages are playing a key role in transmitting signals with information gathered from NASA’s Mars rover missions back to Earth.
With the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover arrival next month, StratEdge packages are yet again traveling to Mars, according to the company. The key to success is the same as before, high-quality and high-reliability packages that can survive the extreme conditions on the journey and finally working on Mars.
“The StratEdge team is honored to be selected again to be part of the great engineering successes on Mars making historic achievements,” said Casey Krawiec, vice president of global sales for StratEdge.
Battle over school openings rages on
New lines have been drawn in the sand of California’s school reopening battle.
Gov. Gavin Newsom at a Wednesday press conference said he believes schools can safely reopen before all teachers have received the COVID-19 vaccine — a stance that puts him at odds with the powerful California Teachers Association and signals intensified negotiations to come. And in an indication of how difficult it’s been for unions and elected officials to reach a consensus, San Francisco on Wednesday took the unprecedented step of suing its own school district and board of education to force campuses to reopen.
Meanwhile, the battle rages on: Coronado’s middle school and high school reopened this week, prompting the California Teachers Association to accuse them of violating state rules that prohibit schools in purple-tier counties from reopening. County and district officials say they aren’t breaking the rules.
4,700 in San Diego County left the
Republican Party in January, but why?
By Ken Stone, reporting for Times of San Diego
More than 4,700 San Diego County Republicans fled the party in January, with almost a quarter switching to Democrat and two-thirds registering as American Independent Partyor picking none, county records show.
The question is why.
Many on the left attribute GOP defections to revulsion over the Capitol riots of Jan. 6. But #LeftTheGOP has trended for years in the Trump presidency, including politicians locally.
Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, recently re-elected as county Democratic Party chairman, says the reduced numbers are simple: “The chickens are coming home to roost for the Republican Party. After years of bending the knee to a traitorous, anti-science, anti-journalist, anti-truth, xenophobic tyrant, we are seeing an exodus in the Republican Party.”
Paula Whitsell, newly elected chair of the Republican Party of San Diego County, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did her office staff.
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Research catches up to world’s fastest-growing plant
Salk researchers discover that miniature aquatic plant provides insight into
genome design principles that could enable development of next-generation crops.
Wolffia, also known as duckweed, is the fastest-growing plant known, but the genetics underlying this strange little plant’s success have long been a mystery to scientists. Now, thanks to advances in genome sequencing, researchers are learning what makes this plant unique—and, in the process, discovering some fundamental principles of plant biology and growth.
A multi-investigator effort led by scientists from the Salk Institute is reporting new findings about the plant’s genome that explain how it’s able to grow so fast. The research, published in the February 2021 issue of Genome Research, will help scientists to understand how plants make trade-offs between growth and other functions, such as putting down roots and defending themselves from pests. This research has implications for designing entirely new plants that are optimized for specific functions, such as increased carbon storage to help address climate change.
Port of San Diego and ECOncrete begin pilot
project to boost Harbor Island ecosystems
The Port of San Diego and ECOncrete, an eco-engineering company, have launched a three-year pilot project on Harbor Island to demonstrate an innovative new design of ECOncrete’s award-winning interlocking COASTALOCK Tide Pool Armor.
Approved by the Board of Port Commissioners in 2019, the pilot project is part of the Port’s unique Blue Economy Incubator, a launching pad for sustainable aquaculture and Port-related blue technology ventures that provides early-stage entrepreneurs with key assets and support services focused on pilot project facilitation.
Attorney Justine Nielsen named governance
chair of ULI San Diego-Tijuana
The Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) San Diego-Tijuana District Council has named Justine Nielsen governance chair of the 700-member binational council, which promotes responsible land use and sustainable communities in the Cali Baja mega-region. As governance chair she will provides guidance and leadership to the district council in compliance with ULI policies and practices. This appointment elevates her to second in command of the district council behind Chairman Brian Mooney, a principal at Rick Engineering Company.
Nielsen is a partner at Procopio, where she leads the firm’s Land Use Practice Group. Nielsen’s practice includes real estate law with an emphasis on land use, planning and entitlement issues.
An active civic leader, she serves as a board member of Navajo Community Planners, Downtown San Diego Partnership, and the San Diego County Taxpayers Association. Nielsen was also recently appointed to the city of San Diego’s Redistricting Commission.
Nielsen has been involved with ULI throughout her career, chairing the district’s robust Young Leaders Group and serving on the management committee.
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Children of the Immaculate Heart opens
new youth facility following litigation
A San Diego organization that helps women and girls overcome the devasting effects of sex trafficking is celebrating the purchase of a new location, a dedicated short-term residential treatment facility for minors.
Litigation over licensing of Children of the Immaculate Heart’s planned expansion has been resolved, their property has now been purchased, and the group has opened its new youth facility, The Refuge, after successful representation by the Thomas More Society and its special counsel attorneys of LiMandri and Jonna LLP.
Children of the Immaculate Heart offers a housing and rehabilitation program for adult women and their children and sought to expand their services to include a short-term residential therapeutic program for sex-trafficked youth. When the ministry ran into licensing issues due to religious discrimination at the California Department of Social Services, the national not-for-profit public interest attorneys initiated legal action.
