First Appeared Friday, 29 August '03

Business Week Calls “UCSF: A Hothouse for Biotech”

The new issue of Business Week (September 8) includes a series of feature articles on UCSF, which it calls “A Hothouse for Biotech.”

In the magazine’s Science & Technology section, an article headlined “UCSF: As Good as it Gets,” notes “The University of California, San Francisco has quietly become one of the world’s premier health sciences institutions, a leader in biomedical research, patient care, higher education, and public service.”

Research and technology luminaries -- including Chiron cofounder Bill Rutter and Intel Chairman Andrew S. Grove -- discuss UCSF’s rise over the years to become one of the top health sciences universities.

The full text of the articles may be viewed online by Business Week subscribers.

A feature article, “UCSF: A Hothouse for Biotech,” leads with the work of biochemist Cynthia Kenyon, whose research on the genes of the microscopic roundworm may uncover some secrets about aging and long and healthy life. The magazine states “this line of inquiry could spawn novel treatments for heart disease, Huntington’s disease, and certain cancers associated with aging.”

The article goes on to track UCSF’s history and contributions to biotechnology and health sciences – including Nobel Prizes won by Chancellor J. Michael Bishop, Harold Varmus and Stanley Prusiner, its 30 faculty who are members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, professors involved in more than 60 biotechnology spin-offs, and former faculty and graduates who now head top US agencies and institutions (CDC director Julie Gerberding, Surgeon General Richard Carmona, and head of the National Academcy of Sciences Bruce Alberts, just to name a few.)

The magazine also notes UCSF’s academic achievements and its ranking among the leaders in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Business Week acknowledges the University’s development and use of technology to solve medical problems, and its looks to UCSF’s future as it expands its work at the new Mission Bay campus. “UCSF’s newest challenge is marrying such technology with more basic research,” it writes. “Genomics, proteomics, nanotechnology, and other fields that probe the fundamental interaction of individual proteins – and even atoms – require intense utilization of databases and pattern-recognition tools.

“At the new Mission Bay campus, UCSF aims to attack these exact problems.”

Links:

Business Week Online