Mission Bay's mission.(Catellus' new biotechnology facility)(Brief Article)

Can Catellus' sprawling development bring biotech out of the suburbs and into the city?

San Francisco may be the birthplace of biotechnology, but the industry's growth has occurred to the south, east and generally just outside the city.

Mission Bay is a massive bid to change that, an attempt to pluck some exotic biotech gemstones to add to San Francisco's economic crown. Centered around a new, 43-acre UCSF research campus, developer Catellus is relying on UCSF's world-class scientific capabilities to draw tenants for much of the 5.95 million square feet of lab and office space it will also construct there.

So far, it's proving a bit of a tough sell.

The company has signed one lease for the lab space it's marketing -- to the J. David Gladstone Institutes -- and is moving forward on one 285,000-square-foot office building for the Gap.

But several biotech companies shopping for big space in recent months, like EOS, Rigel and AGY Therapeutics, have chosen to stay with the rest of the biotech companies -- in a cluster in South San Francisco.

EOS did everything they could to move into Mission Bay, short of signing the lease. "I would love to have gone into Mission Bay, and I drive by it every day to see the buildings go up, but it's the transportation issues and politics surrounding rail on the Peninsula that made us choose elsewhere," says David Martin, MD, CEO of EOS.