UCSF Over Halfway to $1.4-Bil Goal

SAN FRANCISCO-The University of California, San Francisco says it has commitments for $740 million in donations towards the $1.4 billion goal of a multi-year, comprehensive fundraising campaign that promises to accelerate progress in teaching, biomedical research, clinical care and community health.

The Campaign for UCSF will support initiatives such as the UCSF Mission Bay campus, the Parnassus Heights redevelopment, and the Mount Zion Clinical Research building.The Mission Bay Campus, located about a mile from San Francisco’s Financial District, is designed to maintain UCSF’s leadership in the next revolution in biomedical research.

Catellus is the donor of most of the land. It also owns most of the 303 acres in the area. Catellus plans to turn the area into a biotechnology arena and residential neighborhood. The developer plans to build 6,090 units of housing, 850,000 square feet of retail space and five million square feet of office space, mostly devoted to biotechnology.

The UCSF Mission Bay campus will be built to include 2.65 million-sf of new space over the next 2 decades, doubling the amount of research space at UCSF. Construction of the first laboratory building at UCSF Mission Bay began in 1999 and is scheduled for completion in 2002. The 430,000-sf campus will cost about $223 million and will house some of the university’s biotechnology and medical research departments.

Plans for the first phase of the new teaching and research campus also include a second research building, a Campus Community Center, the Institute for Bioengineering and Quantitative Biomedical Research and a campus green that will be larger than San Francisco’s Union Square.

During the announcement on the total of raised funds to date, UCSF added that the effort has already been met for completion of UCSF Mission Bay’s first phase.

As the basic science programs relocate to Mission Bay’s first building, the vacated space will become available for new and existing programs at UCSF’s main campus on Parnassus Avenue, which overlooks Golden Gate Park. The campus is developing plans for a translational health sciences program, which will include 6 initiatives: the Center for the Study of Immunological Diseases, Center for the Study of Infectious Diseases, Genetics of Complex Diseases and Therapeutics, Program in Stem Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering, Laboratory for Craniofacial Biology and Sandler Center for Basic Research in Asthma.

Additionally, a 160,000-sf clinical research is planned by the university to meet the needs and expand the programs at UCSF/Mount Zion Medical Center. This building will support several research programs, including those of the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer.