Nation's HIV research general Tony Fauci: Cure in 'discovery phase'

Dr. Tony Fauci.

As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the past 28 years, Tony Fauci has seen the fight against the AIDS virus travel from only a hope for treatment to serious talk of a cure.

But, Fauci warned, an AIDS cure still is only in the discovery phase.
Speaking last week, as he keynoted the Centers for AIDS Research's national scientific symposium at the University of California, San Francisco's Mission Bay campus, Fauci said there are several avenues for fighting HIV but patients must follow treatments for those treatments to be effective. That includes Truvada, from Foster City-based Gilead Sciences Inc (NASDAQ: GILD)., that was recently approved for pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP.
After his address, Fauci spoke with me about HIV treatments, HIV and aging and the road to a cure.

New wave of local companies tackles Lou Gehrig's disease

Patrizia Fanara and David Fineman of KineMed.

Hoping to find clues for unlocking potentially lucrative cures to diseases such as Alzheimer’s, drug development companies are starting with a more obscure but equally devastating condition: Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Five Bay Area companies and at least four local research institutions are working on programs in Lou Gehrig’s, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis., which over three to five years gradually immobilizes patients’ bodies while their minds remain sharp.
What’s more, they’re finding success.
Each of the companies is pursuing different ALS bets, indicating how little is really known about the disease. But their goals are the same: In the short term, expand the options for the 30,000 ALS patients in the United states beyond the single drug that exists today. Longer term, they hope to use what they learn to target more prevalent diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

UCSF partners schizophrenia treatments

Bob Bennett and Rachel Loewy.

Innovative treatment for schizophrenia by the Family Service Agency and researchers at UC San Francisco shows great promise in improving patients’ mental health and cutting costs.

The disease, which usually strikes in adolescence and can last a lifetime, affects an estimated 6,000 San Franciscans and 70,000 in the Bay Area.
About 170 local patients have gone through the Prevention and Recovery in Early Psychosis or PREP program, which emphasizes early intervention, counseling, cognitive training and use of fewer pharmaceuticals in lower doses to treat the mental illness. Specialized software from San Francisco-based Posit Science trains schizophrenic patients to distinguish hallucinations from rational thinking — which may help alter how their brains process information.

Patients' tales, biotech legends add weight to BayBio awards

Genentech co-founder Herb Boyer.

When two or more biotechs are gathered, you hear the usual phrases, including the old standby, “We're serving patients with unmet medical needs.”
Box checked, move on to other things and the phrase quietly floats away.

BayBio, Northern California’s life sciences industry trade group, has been beating the “for the patients” drum for the past couple of years especially -- and it didn’t stop at the organization’s annual Pantheon event Thursday night. Problem is, when you hear rote phrases so often, they start to bounce off of you.
That is, until something like this year’s Pantheon ceremony. Many of the companies winning BayBio's DiNA awards brought patients with them to accept their plaques; some actually let patients tell their stories.
Putting patients in front of corporate slide decks is needed by the biotech industry, which has been wringing its collective hands over cuts in research funding and the drought of venture capital cash. Telling those stories, or actually helping patients tell their own stories outside of industry settings, could win over leery legislators and a weary public that feels bombarded with stories of unsafe drugs and failed clinical trials.

UCSF-led group lands $10M for study of advanced prostate cancer

A group of researchers led by theUniversity of California, San Francisco will spend $10 million over three years studying advanced prostate cancer, which is resistant to even the most promising treatments. Eric Small, M.D., deputy director of UCSF's cancer center, will lead the group, which the university characterizes as a "dream team."

Shinya Yamanaka of Gladstone, UCSF wins Nobel Prize

Shinya Yamanaka, the Japanese scientist who reprogrammed mature mouse cells so they could be manipulated to become any type of cell, was named the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. Yamanaka works part time at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco.

'Startup in a Box' program loses leader to consulting firm

Ken Harrison.

A public-private partnership aimed at growing San Francisco’s biotech ecosystem has lost the leader of a core group of programs for the second time in its 1-1/2 years. Ken Harrison, who was entrepreneurship program manager at the QB3 institute housed at the University of California, San Francisco, took a job last month with L.E.K. Consulting. He had joined BioSF, the organization assembled last year by QB3, the mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the San Francisco Center for Economic Development, in January. In his role at QB3, or the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, Harrison oversaw the exploding Startup in a Box and Accelerator programs.

UCSF nabs $3 million to lead artificial kidney effort

Shuvo Roy.

A national research effort led by UC San Francisco to develop an implantable artificial kidney has won $3 million in funding, raising $2.25 million from theNational Institutes of Health and $750,000 from the John and Marcia Goldman Foundation. The biomedical research campus said the funding will launch an effort to develop the device, with a goal of reaching clinical trials by 2017.

Mission Bay roars to life: Biotechs, UCSF, residential developers jostle for space in S.F.'s newest neighborhood

QB3's Reg Kelly.

On a typical lunch hour in Mission Bay, drug researchers rub elbows with venture capitalists and postdoctoral fellows at Peasant Pies’ big communal table. When store co-founder Ali Keshavarzarrived with his French meat pies four years ago, his store was a vacant shell on an empty plaza. Now Peasant Pies serves lunch to some 400 people a day at its Mission Bay space. “We get more people every day, from housing units, pharma companies, students finishing Ph.D.s,” Keshavarz said. “It’s like a phoenix rising.” With more than 50 life sciences companies and venture capital firms, about 1.7 million square feet of commercial office and lab space, and pilings in place for another 423,900 square feet of office space, Mission Bay is emerging from the recession with plans for a new wave of growth that will crest in 2014-15. “All of this is opportunistic. You try to be flexible and nimble,” said Reg Kelly, director of the QB3 institute at theUniversity of California, San Francisco. “I would like Mission Bay to be a magnet for innovators of all kinds.”

Allopartis subsists on seed cash, Mission Bay incubator space

Allopartis CEO Robert Blazej.

Allopartis Biotechnologies is not unlike the other 25 or so companies that have set up shop in the Mission Bay Innovation Center: It is a startup with eager leadership, intriguing science and a penchant for saving a few dollars here, a few dollars there. What it does not have — again like many others in the life sciences incubator space overseen by biotech company FibroGen Inc. — is a solid path carrying its find-a-better-enzyme technology to the market. Not that the five-person team led by Robert Blazej, Allopartis’s co-founder and president, isn’t trying. In fact, on its way toward discovering better enzymes to more efficiently turn cellulose into energy, the four-year-old company decided to focus on higher-margin biochemicals. The company is waiting for partnerships to come through after “several” pilot-type collaborations with large companies, Blazej said.

Desmond-Hellmann: UCSF must be 'nimble and competitive'

UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann.

An advisory council that will look at new ways of governing UCSF within the University of California system will meet by the beginning of 2013, an important early step as the institution seeks a degree of autonomy. University of California, San Francisco, Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann told about 300 students, faculty, staff and visitors in her third annual “State of the University” address Tuesday that the move ensures a “nimble and competitive” UCSF in a world of health care reform and flat National Institutes of Health budgets.

UCSF eyes bigger Mission Bay play

Mission Bay (foreground).

University of California, San Francisco, could build nearly 850,000 square feet more of labs, housing and offices than originally expected at its Mission Bay research campus, according to plans being weighed by university officials. The institution is considering several options as it looks at how its booming 43-acre research campus will develop over the next 20 years. The most aggressive would raise the existing 2.65 million square foot building cap by nearly a third, but, ultimately, any proposal must jump through a lot of hoops — starting with community meetings in October and November and ending with UC Board of Regents approval in November 2014. The process has implications for other Mission Bay players. It could force the city to undertake a new, lengthy environmental impact report, and it might handcuff further private development in the high-profile medical and life sciences enclave. Unless UCSF can offset increased lab and office space by, for example, building more housing to lower the number of car-driving commuters, the city might seek an EIR that looks more broadly at Mission Bay and surrounding neighborhoods.

UCSF nets $20M gift for new Mission Bay building

A $20 million gift to UCSF from philanthropist Charles Feeney will help pay for a new building housing the university's global health sciences program while adding to an awesome legacy by the co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers. In all, Feeney's Atlantic Philanthropies has given more than $292 million to theUniversity of California, San Francisco, making him the single-largest contributor to any campus in the UC system, the university said, and arguably the granddaddy of UCSF's Mission Bay campus.

QB3's 'Startup in a Box' powers new wave of biotech startups

Caribou Biosciences CEO Rachel Haurwitz.

QB3’s boxes are stacking up. Startup in a Box, which initially aimed at helping 15 wannabe life sciences entrepreneurs blow past barriers to launching companies, has aided 76 startups since it began a year ago — and it is pushing deeper into the Bay Area. The 17 companies fully operational with Startup in a Box’s aid have set up shop in San Francisco, Berkeley, Walnut Creek and San Jose. That diaspora is exactly what leaders of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, or QB3, had in mind when they started the program in summer 2011 to help entrepreneurs-in-waiting incorporate a company, get startup government funding, protect their intellectual property or simply set up a no-fee company bank account. What they weren’t counting on, however, was an overflowing box.

Bayer opens Mission Bay 'CoLaborator' with 2 tenants

Bayer's Chris Haskell.

Bayer HealthCare's answer to the incubator boom -- and the company's push to tap outside innovation -- officially kicks off Monday with the opening of its Mission Bay CoLaborator. Two companies -- Aronora Inc. and ProLynx LLC -- are the first tenants of the 6,000-square-foot ground-floor incubator in Bayer's nearly 2-year-old research center. Aronora, led by CEO Andras Gruber, is working on drugs that prevent or interfere with blood clotting. ProLynx is developing "linker systems" that help predict and control the extension of drug half-life, or the amount of time it takes for a body to lose half of the amount of a drug.

UCSF hires former Stanford fundraiser for development job

John B. Ford

UCSF has hired former Stanford University fundraiser John B. Ford as its new vice chancellor of university development and alumni relations. Ford replaces Carol Moss, who was in the job at the University of California, San Francisco, less than two years before leaving in spring 2011 to become vice president for medical development and vice dean for external affairs at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Ford will begin his $395,400 new job Sept. 17, overseeing a 154-person team and an operating budget of $30 million. He also will be vice president of the UCSF Foundation.

Gladstone researchers find epilepsy drug that may work for Alzheimer's patients

Dr. Lennart Mucke of Gladstone and UCSF.

A drug that already curbs epileptic seizures could be used to reverse memory loss and the loss of other brain functions in some Alzheimer's disease patients, researchers at the Gladstone Institutes discovered. Although preliminary and from studies of mice, the discovery could give new hope for patients with the debilitating brain disease. Because the drug already is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for epilepsy patients, it has several years of safety data, which could fast-track in-human studies and, eventually, its approval for Alzheimer's patients.

UCSF, chancellor shifting to Mission Bay

UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann will move into a new office building at Mission Bay, signaling a shift in the school’s center of gravity from Parnassus Avenue to its growing research campus. The University of California, San Francisco, in December will start work on the $94 million, six-story, 251,000-square-foot building, which will have shared workspaces and no traditional offices. That goes for Desmond-Hellmann as well.

Gladstone, Jesse Dylan collaborate as research institute rebrands

The times they are a-changin’ at the Gladstone Institutes, thanks in part to a Dylan. The San Francisco biomedical research organization said Tuesday that it is launching a new website, tweaking its name and teaming with award-winning film maker Jesse Dylan on a series of short films about Gladstone scientists, supporters and patients who benefit from research. Dylan, the son of legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, with his film company Wondros won an Emmy Award for its 2008 “Yes We Can” presidential campaign ad about Barack Obama. 

UCSF to form advisory board for 'challenging times'

The University of California's only standalone medical campus will form an advisory board to help it "through these challenging times," said Susan Desmond-Hellmann, UCSF's chancellor.

Desmond-Hellmann told the governing UC Regents of UCSF's plans for the dedicated advisory board on Wednesday during a meeting at the school's Mission Bay campus.