San Francisco Examiner - December 6, 2004
Bonnie Eslinger, Staff Writer

Located in Mission Bay, the new six-story, 190,000-square-foot J. David Gladstone Institutes is part of an ambitious city plan to create a 303-acre biotech corridor in the area.

"It will bring some of the best biotech and pharmaceutical companies in the world to this area," said Dr. Robert Mahley, president of the Gladstone Institutes.

Six years in the making, the new building brings together three Gladstone research facilities -- which were previously operating in separate locations at San Francisco General Hospital -- under one roof.

"That provides a tremendous amount of synergy," said Mahley. "If you bring great scientists together, give them resources and then let them do their thing, great things will happen."

There are plans to expand the institute's research capabilities, ultimately growing the staff within the next decade from its current number of 330 to more than 500 employees.

Boasting a state-of-the art laboratory design, the research floors of the new building incorporate long corridors with open lounges and hundreds of workstations to encourage interaction among the scientists and researchers.

Often the work done in different research areas will overlap, said Mahley. For example, a protein that Gladstone was investigating in its heart disease research turned out to be a "major risk factor for Alzheimer's," he noted.

The Gladstone Institutes was founded 25 years ago and has an annual budget of $36 million. It is funded primarily through National Institutes of Health grants, as well as through a trust established in 1971 after the death of Southern California shopping mall developer J. David Gladstone.

While the Institute is a private, nonprofit research organization, Gladstone researchers hold faculty positions at UCSF. The institute teaches and trains postdoctoral and graduate students, and now, the research organization is located next to the university's new 43-acre Mission Bay campus.

Dr. Lennart Mucke, director of Gladstone's neurological disease institute, the organization's newest area of study, said he expects his researchers, along with scientists at UCSF, to lead national efforts to find a cure for Alzheimer's. "We're bringing Alzheimer's research to the Bay Area," he said. "There is going to be major efforts made here to fight this disease."

Some facts about the three major diseases studied at the Gladstone Institutes:

* At approximately 1 million deaths per year, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death, accounting for almost 41 percent of all deaths in the United States.

* Worldwide, 40 million people are living with HIV or AIDS; 19,000 are in San Francisco. Since 1981, 20 million people have died from AIDS.

* Up to 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and the number of cases is expected to double in the next 25 years. Of people over 65 years, 10 percent will show signs of the disease.

Source: Gladstone Institutes

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