VA Medical Center to call Mission Bay hub home
Mission Bay will soon be welcoming a new tenant to its life science hub: the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
The VA center is opening a 42,000-square-foot research center in Mission Bay once construction is complete in the late summer or early fall. Approximately 130 staff members will be relocated there from its campus on Clement Street in the Richmond District.
“This allows us to decompress the VA campus and provide new state-of-the-art facilities to conduct important scientific work,” said the center’s associate research and development chief, Carl Grunfeld.
With $83 million in expenditures last year, the center has the largest research program in the VA system. Last year, 37,000 patients passed through its doors, out of the 179,000 veterans the center serves in Northern California.
Much of its work is focused on HIV/AIDS, dermatology and bone disease, areas in which it works in cooperation with UC San Francisco, which has a major center across the road from the new center in Mission Bay.
“Expanding our re-
search program is significant because it gives us the opportunity to continue the existing collaboration and partnership with our research counterparts at UCSF,” Grunfeld said.
What freeze? If, as we’re told, the Facebook flop has investors fleeing for the hills, at least one Bay Area company didn’t get the message.
BioMarin Pharmaceutical, which is already public, has just raised $235 million in an offering underwritten by
Barclays and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
The Novato company focuses on treatments for rare genetic metabolic diseases, including one affecting as few as 5,000 people worldwide. It has four drugs on the market and seven more in clinical trials this year.
Founded in 1997, BioMarin has 800 employees worldwide and reported $376.3 million in revenue in 2010. The company, with operations in 40 countries, is looking to spend up to $275 million in R&D this year.
“We have a strong drug development engine that we need to keep feeding,” said company spokesman Bob Purcell.
On yet another down day for the Dow, BioMarin closed up 1.3 percent Monday, at $36. Sterling arrangement: There’s money in teaching English as a second language.
GlobalEnglish, a Brisbane company that markets “enterprise fluency” language products to corporations worldwide, has been bought by Pearson, the British education company that also owns the Economist and the Financial Times, for $90 million in cash.
The 15-year-old company has 450 corporate customers, including GE, Hong Kong bank HSBC and India’s Tata Consultancy Services; and has 200 employees in 20 countries. It reported $42 million in sales last year; 75 percent of those enrolled in its cloudbased courses are in Asia and Latin America.
CEO Mahesh Ram called the acquisition a “wonderful endorsement of the value of GlobalEnglish’s unique focus, and a strong complement to Pearson’s existing portfolio of offerings.” Export stars: Two Northern California companies are among the recipients of this year’s president’s “E” award for “contributing significantly in the effort to increase United States exports.”
OSIsoft is a San Leandro company that sells data and event management software to a variety of industries in 110 countries. “Exports today represent over 50 percent of our business,” said Patrick Kennedy, founder and CEO of the 32-year-old company, which has 800 employees, 200 of them hired in the past five years. McWong Environmental and Energy Group is a Sacramento company that designs and equips wastewater treatment projects in China. The company, which has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, was cited by U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson for “demonstrating four years of successive export growth.” Girth governance: If first lady Michelle Obama can have a “Let’s Move Initiative” to fight childhood obesity, how about a “Let’s Move Silicon Valley Businesses” initiative to combat similar issues associated with, say, the overconsumption of pizza during all-night hackathons?
That’s one of the ideas associated with a conference focusing on company wellness and programs for employees and their families at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus on Wednesday.
Speakers include Herb Schultz, regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Tom Robinson, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital; and California Endowment CEO Robert Ross.
Breakfast, lunch, and fruits and vegetables from a local farmers’ market will be available. Details of the event, sponsored by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, can be found at svlghealth2012.eventbrite.com.