Biomedical Firms Targeted : UCSD Plans to Build Campus Business Park

In a project that university officials say will both accelerate the transfer of its technology to the marketplace and provide much-needed laboratory space to its researchers, UC San Diego plans to begin construction within a year on a 30-acre business park on the eastern part of its campus.

Although financing plans are still in preliminary stages, university officials say the park and about 750,000 square feet of buildings will probably be developed in some kind of partnership or joint venture with private industry. The first phase of the park could cost $15 million to $20 million.

One of the financing arrangements being contemplated by UCSD would involve private firms--either real estate developers or manufacturers including biomedical companies--obtaining rights to develop on the site in exchange for allocating part of the buildings as laboratory space for UCSD faculty and researchers, UCSD director of development Mark Nelson said Monday.

Biomedical Manufacturers

UCSD officials expect interest in the park to be high, particularly among biomedical manufacturers, because a presence there will give them access to research by members of a medical faculty that is among the best-endowed with grants in the nation. Faculty members in other UCSD departments, including engineering, will also be given access to laboratory space in the park, Nelson said.

“From a marketing standpoint, we will be reaching out to attract firms that would provide the right linkage with the university,” Nelson said. The university will hire an outside financial consultant by this summer to draw up financing options, he said.

The as-yet-unnamed “science research park” will be an integral part of what UCSD School of Medicine Dean Dr. Gerard N. Burrow calls the university’s planned “biomedical corridor” which is designed to facilitate the transfer of technology from “the laboratory bench to clinical bedside.”

Scientific Advances

“My vision of the science park is that it is simply not going to be a collection of buildings with no relationship to the university,” Burrow said. “Scientists within the park will relate in some manner to members of the faculty.” Such a relationship will ensure that scientific advances filter down to clinical use as quickly as possible, he said.

Before scientific advances in cellular and molecular biology can be used clinically, “they need to be exploited commercially,” Burrow said.

“A lot of the ideas that transfer from the lab bench to bedside go on as a result of proximity,” Burrow said. “When biochemists and clinical researchers eat lunch together, they may discuss something the clinician sees as a problem or that the biochemist has discovered in lab. A connection can then be made between the two.”

The business park will be situated on the 245-acre part of the 1,200-acre UCSD campus that is east of Interstate 5. The eastern section of the campus, bounded by La Jolla Village Drive on the south, Regents Road to the east, Genesee Avenue on the north and Interstate 5 to the west, has so far gone undeveloped except for some student housing.

The business park will be next to the new $75-million, 120-bed UCSD clinical hospital on which construction will start this spring. The hospital eventually will be surrounded by several ancillary medical facilities, Nelson said, including ones for eye care, diagnostic care, skilled nursing, and psychiatry.

Burrow, 56, who became dean of UCSD’s medical school last March, helped line up UC regents’ approval for the new hospital last summer. The business park is critical, he said, in easing the shortage of research laboratory space on campus for the 452 medical school faculty members and 135 post-doctoral researchers.

Although the medical school faculty was one of the nation’s leading ones last year in landing research grants totaling $76 million, a 9% increase from 1987, the grants usually do not include funds for capital equipment or buildings.

And, since medical school enrollment is now being limited by the state Legislature to 120 new students a year, UCSD cannot finance new laboratories from its capital funds because the state has also tied campus expansion to enrollment growth, Burrow said.

As a result, UCSD’s only options in financing laboratory space are private fund raising or attracting the financial participation of private industry in projects such as the business park, Burrow said.

Unless addressed, the shortage of laboratory space on campus will lead to difficulties in recruiting faculty and researchers to UCSD, Burrow said.