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Area Development - Site Selection, Facility Planning and Workforce Development

Denali Therapeutics Plans Salt Lake City, Utah, Medicine Development Center

04/12/2021
Denali Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company, will establish a research and development center in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company will create roughly 100 new high-paying jobs in the state in the next 10 years.

The biotechnology company focuses on discovering, developing, manufacturing, and ultimately commercializing medicines to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, lysosomal storage diseases, and more. Denali has developed a proprietary drug technology platform to allow for the transportation of drugs across the blood-brain barrier and into the brain.

“At Denali Therapeutics, our purpose is to defeat degeneration. This is an exciting time as our pipeline of potential treatments for neurodegenerative diseases continues to advance and we have a need to build additional capabilities to meet our anticipated development program needs,” said Ryan Watts, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Denali. “After consideration of multiple locations for expanding our footprint, we decided that Utah offers the best overall environment and we look forward to being part of the growing life science community there.”

Denali may earn up to 15% of the new state taxes it will pay over the 10-year life of the agreement in the form of a Utah Legislature-authorized Economic Development Tax Increment Finance (EDTIF) tax credit. The GOED Board has approved a post-performance tax credit not to exceed $1,355,894. Each year that Denali meets the criteria in its contract with the state, it will earn a portion of the total tax credit.

“With patience, seeds can sprout. Denali Therapeutics is a high-growth life sciences company that evaluated several western U.S. metropolitan areas before selecting Salt Lake City for an expansion,” said Theresa A. Foxley, president and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah (EDCUtah). “Utah first got on their radar thanks to a proactive GOED/EDCUtah visit to their Bay Area offices in February 2018. We nurtured the connection since then. This is a win for the Global Strategy & Outreach effort.”

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