[BTinSF]

Friday, April 17, 2009
Promise of new connections rises with buildings
Institutes, companies to mix with clinicians
San Francisco Business Times - by Ron Leuty

Mission Bay is slowly but surely morphing into a one-stop health-care shop, as more research institutes play a vital role in transforming basic science into bedside treatments.

Institutes for cancer, orthopedics, cardiovascular and neurosciences are opening, under construction or moving forward with planning at the Mission Bay campus of the University of California, San Francisco. They follow on sites like the J. David Gladstone Institutes’ cardiovascular, virology and immunology, and neurological centers.

The institutes also come with the promise of linking with companies, patients and patient advocates, particularly as UCSF pushes on with plans to open a $1.3 billion women’s, children’s and cancer hospital with 289 beds in 2014.

“It makes all the sense in the world for us to be there,” said Frank McCormick, director of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and its research institute.

The 162,000-square-foot building along Third Street that houses the cancer center and research institute officially opens June 2.

It’s a matter of convenience, since some lab researchers also see patients, but it also helps change culture when clinical practitioners and lab people are on the same campus, McCormick said. “It really does change the way people think about what they’re doing.”

The cancer center is on the northeastern edge of UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. Next to it, construction is under way on the $254 million, 236,000-square-foot Cardiovascular Research Institute.

Across Third Street, Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. is building a 210,000-square-foot building that will house Pfizer Inc.’s Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center, which is looking at stem cells, peptides, proteins and emerging technologies like RNA interference as well as new ways of delivering vaccines.

The hospital will be a stone’s throw to the south. A couple-minute stroll down the campus’ plaza leads to either UCSF’s neuroscience center — which could house nearly 600 employees and students by mid-2011 — or the Gladstone Institutes.

It’s those potential linkages between patients, researchers, clinicians and companies that excite David Hartman, president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society’s Northern California chapter. In fact, he’s already seen it work.

Soon after the society moved its offices in August from Oakland to the first floor of Alexandria’s 1700 Owens St., Hartman ran into Gladstone Institutes President Dr. Robert Mahley in the hallway. Gladstone, though based next door at 1650 Owens St., recently expanded its translational research center in the Alexandria building.

“We stumbled onto each other and just started talking,” Hartman said. “They have MS researchers there and we were sharing information about resources. We both are benefiting.”

The MS Society, with its focus on patients and their families, may presage the hospital’s ability to tie together different aspects of health care. For one, some $12.6 million in National Multiple Sclerosis Society research funds land back in the Bay Area, mostly in the UC system. And Dr. Doug Goodin, medical director of the UCSF Multiple Sclerosis Center, is on the MS Society’s local board of trustees.

The location also ultimately puts the MS Society closer to patients, who can cross 16th Street to the chapter’s classes or be directed to a UCSF researcher’s clinical trial.

It also could go a long way to showing philanthropists that their money is being put to good use.

“We have the ability to take a funder, walk them across the street and show them the research we’re enabling for them, then bring them back to see how the treatments are going to help people with MS by showing them the MS clinic or a program we have here,” Hartman said.

“That’s a gold mine for us. That’s a way of solidifying and making real where their investment is going.”


rleuty@bizjournals.com / (415) 288-4939

Source: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/...ml?t=printable