Why a Bay Area Biotech Company Set Up Shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

A biotech startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area recently set up a research lab. Not in Boston. Not in San Diego. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

At first, that might sound like a punchline. But spend ten minutes talking to Ben Sajdak, the director running Fauna Bio's Wisconsin operations out of UW Oshkosh, and you start to realize the punchline might actually be on the coasts.

Fauna Bio is doing something genuinely wild: studying how animals like hibernating ground squirrels, naked mole rats, and elephants have evolved to avoid diseases that kill humans. Squirrels that drop their heart rate from 300 beats per minute to three… and survive. Elephants that almost never get cancer. The company uses machine learning to compare genetic data across hundreds of mammals and develop new human therapeutics from what evolution has already figured out.

It's cutting-edge work. The kind you'd expect to see in a Cambridge lab or a sleek South San Francisco research park.

Instead, part of it is happening in the Fox Valley, powered by a 20-year-old breeding colony of hibernating ground squirrels that exists because a UW Oshkosh professor named Dr. Dana Merriman got curious about how these animals see.

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The Inverse Brain Drain

We talk a lot about brain drain in the Midwest. Talented people leaving for the coasts. Startups relocating to be closer to capital. The assumption that serious innovation requires a San Francisco zip code.

But Fauna Bio's story flips that script.

They didn't come to Wisconsin as a favor. They came because Wisconsin had something they couldn't easily replicate anywhere else: a genetically diverse colony of ground squirrels native to this region, institutional knowledge built over two decades, and a university willing to build creative academic-industry partnerships.

"Why not Oshkosh?" Ben said when I visited the lab. "That's kind of the point."

It's a simple question, but it cuts through a lot of assumptions. Why do we assume cutting-edge science can't happen here? Why do we assume the talent isn't here?

Ben went to UW Oshkosh. Got his biology degree here. Did his graduate work studying hibernating species. When Fauna Bio needed someone to run operations in Wisconsin, he was already in the ecosystem. Trained, capable, and maybe not interested in relocating to California.

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The Talent Nobody's Talking About

One of the hesitations startups have about building in Wisconsin is talent recruitment. Can you actually find people?

Ben's experience challenges that assumption.

"We get maybe a tenth of the applicants that Fauna's headquarters out in California might get for the same position," he told me. "But within that, you get a lot of really hardworking Midwesterners that are interested in science and are super trainable. They want to get involved in research and they don't want to move across the country to one of the coasts to do it."

Fewer applicants. Higher signal. Lower noise.

There's a version of this story that sounds defensive. Like we're trying to convince ourselves we're good enough. But that's not what's happening here. Coastal biotech hubs face real constraints: astronomical costs, brutal competition for talent, expensive facilities. Wisconsin offers an alternative that's not about being second-best. It's about being strategically smarter.

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What the Coasts Are Missing

Here's what struck me most from my conversation with Ben: the research infrastructure already exists.

According to Ben, the research infrastructure already exists in Wisconsin.

"In the biomedical space alone, between the institutions, the big ones certainly, but even the smaller Universities of Wisconsin. There's really no science questions that we can't answer," Ben said. "There are labs specializing in the latest technology, stem cells, regenerative medicine, all these areas."

The problem isn't capability. It's visibility. It's connection.

Excellent research is happening across Wisconsin's universities, but it often stays siloed. Ben mentioned that he didn't even know about NASA-related work happening at Lawrence University until recently. 

There's a discovery problem, not a talent problem.

That's partly why Ben is working to start a Fox Valley Science Society. Creating space for researchers across institutions to actually talk to each other, share what they're working on, and build the kind of cross-pollination that turns isolated projects into ecosystem momentum.

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A Template, Not an Anomaly

Fauna Bio's presence in Wisconsin shouldn't be a one-off story. It should be a template.

The ingredients are here: strong research universities, specialized facilities that would cost millions to replicate, a workforce that wants to stay, and operating costs that make coastal executives do double-takes.

Dr. Ryan Springer, Ben's colleague at the Oshkosh lab, is working on NASA-funded research to send hibernating ground squirrels into space. The goal? See if hibernation helps mammals avoid the bone density loss, muscle atrophy, and radiation damage that astronauts face. It's the kind of project that sounds like science fiction, and it's happening at a regional public university in Wisconsin.

The question isn't whether Wisconsin can support serious biotech work. It clearly can.

The question is whether we're telling that story loudly enough and whether coastal companies are paying attention.

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What This Means for Wisconsin

I've spent the last few years working on Startup Wisconsin, trying to amplify what's already happening across the state. Stories like Fauna Bio's connection to Oshkosh remind me why that work matters.

We're not trying to become the next Silicon Valley. We don't need to be. What we need is to get better at connecting the dots. Between researchers and startups, between universities and industry, between what Wisconsin has and what the rest of the country needs.

Ben put it simply: "It can be done here. It's just a matter of community building and teaching people that it's possible."

If a Bay Area biotech company can find competitive advantage in Oshkosh, maybe the coasts should start paying closer attention to what's happening in the middle of the country.

And maybe we should too.

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‍Jacob Miller is Marketing & Brand Manager at Headway and Marketing Director for Startup Wisconsin, as well as host of their podcast. As a Yooper based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he enjoys all the Midwest has to offer.