UCSD Proposes Innovator Space as Entrepreneurial Life Sciences Hub

Officials at UC San Diego are seeking to build a new “Center for Innovative Therapeutics” that would serve as a hub for a variety of academic research collaborations, as well as an incubator for accelerating private life sciences startups.

University officials described their proposal for the first time at the end of an annual cancer symposium held yesterday at the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center. They said they plan to present their plans for the project, which carries an estimated $110 million pricetag, to the University of California Regents in May.

About half of the three-story, 110,000-square-foot facility would be made available for private life sciences startups, according to Thomas Kipps, interim director of the Moores Cancer Center. The center, which Kipps calls “the innovator space,” would be affiliated with Moores. The UCSD proposal calls for building the facility on a 6.3-acre lot between the Moores Cancer Center and the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology that is part of the UC San Diego Science Research Park.

Kipps says funding for the project already has been secured from “UC century bonds.” The University of California sold an $860 million taxable bond offering last month. The 100-year bonds yield 4.858 percent, or slightly more than 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds. If regents approve the project, UCSD could move forward quickly on design and construction. The project is tentatively slated for completion in mid-2015.

Kipps says the project was conceived less than a year ago during a meeting with UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox. “We wanted to see if we could develop something that was similar to an incubator she had done at [North Carolina State University] that was very successful,” Kipps says. (Fox was the first female chancellor of the Raleigh, NC, campus before she was named to head UCSD in 2004.) The proposal quickly drew two dozen “letters of interest” from local biotechs, pharmaceutical companies, and contract research organizations (CRO) that support the idea, including a CRO that wants to come in as an anchor tenant, Kipps says.

Kipps and Fox presented the plan to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.