San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Gladstone Institutes plans growth in S.F.
The Gladstone Institutes, a pioneering San Francisco biomedical research nonprofit, plans to expand its Mission Bay building by more than one-third over the next three years — a potential economic boon for a city struggling with persistent office vacancies and lagging returnto-office rates.
The $160 million expansion will add 75,000 square feet to the building’s current 200,000, as well as 200 more jobs and 12-15 new labs. Construction is expected to begin in late 2024 and end in 2026.
The building, which currently holds 30 labs, uses every inch of space it has, with some wideopen spaces meant to foster collaboration, some rooms full of specialized equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and other rooms sterilized with doors shut, where stem cells are grown from human skin cells rather than from embryos, and studied.
At a news conference Tuesday in the patio at the Owens Street facility where the addition will be built, Gladstone President Deepak Srivastava spoke about how the new space and workers will allow the institute to continue pushing biomedicine forward, especially in areas like heart disease, viral diseases, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
“We’re at a moment in time today where we can imagine, finally, not just accepting the diseases that we suffer from across
the world, but actually think about curing those diseases, once and for all,” he said. “By adding about a third more space to our building, we’ll be able to bring in the talent that we need to make these dreams a reality.”
The patio, he noted, will be replaced by outdoor space on a newly built rooftop, with walls to mitigate the San Francisco
winds.
The move is also an example of changes Mayor London Breed hopes to see in the city. At the institute on Tuesday, she spoke about how she hopes the life sciences industry — for which “there is no work-from-home option” — will continue to expand in San Francisco.
“The life sciences and biotech
and all the great things that are occurring, especially around the Mission Bay community, it’s changing the world. It’s saving lives,” she said. “And when we think about our economic recovery, it is so critical to the future of our city.”
During a private tour of the lab ahead of the news conference, she told Srivastava how excited she was about the expansion, adding that she hopes more labs will open in the city, even if it means adjusting existing office buildings to accommodate them.
“We’re trying to make it easier to do that so that it’s possible to not only expand and build out, but if there’s a need for other lab space in another location, I want to make sure that that’s an option too,” she said.
To do that, she said, she wants to make navigating the city’s various building codes for different uses — and converting a building to fit different codes — “a lot simpler to do.”
“We’ve done that with retail space where it’s become office, retail and housing,” she said. “So it’s getting more creative with our spaces and not just focusing on offices, but what’s possible.”
And the Gladstone Institutes, which was one of the first companies to build at Mission Bay in 2004, benefits from its location in the city as well, Srivastava told Breed as he guided their walk through the lab’s long hallways.
“We have a very close partnership with UCSF, which is right across the street, and we’ve more recently developed similar relationships with Berkeley and Stanford, to really fully capitalize on the microenvironment that we have here that’s really unparalleled,” he said.