The ever-ex­pand­ing group of biotechs mov­ing in­to Oys­ter Point can now ex­pect new neigh­bors as the boom­ing life sci­ences hub in South San Fran­cis­co con­tin­ues to grow.

Re­al es­tate de­vel­op­er IQHQ has put its foot down on a main road skirt­ing the neigh­bor­hood, pur­chas­ing 580 Dubuque Av­enue for an undis­closed sum. Known as South City Sta­tion, the site gives them 213,000 square feet to build on.

Don’t rec­og­nize the name? Try Cre­ative Sci­ence Prop­er­ties. The San Diego-based com­pa­ny changed its name back in Feb­ru­ary just as it un­veiled a whop­ping $770 mil­lion eq­ui­ty raise to buy and build life sci­ence cam­pus­es at life sci­ence hotspots around the world.

“Mid-tier to large life sci­ence ten­ants” will be the tar­get clien­tele, ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

“Once com­plete, South City Sta­tion will im­me­di­ate­ly meet the grow­ing de­mand for pre­mier life sci­ence re­al es­tate and R&D space in the thriv­ing South San Fran­cis­co mar­ket,” Tra­cy Mur­phy, the pres­i­dent, said in a state­ment. “It will be de­vel­oped to at­tract top tal­ent.”

These are peo­ple who have been ex­haust­ed by traf­fic and long com­mutes, Mur­phy told End­points News in an email. By con­trast, the new site’s lo­ca­tion right next to a new Cal­train sta­tion ex­pect­ed to open in spring of 2021 promis­es an easy com­mute all the way through San Jose.

It’s al­so a five-minute dri­ve from Oys­ter Point, one of the hottest de­vel­op­ments in the Bay Area, where a slate of play­ers from As­traZeneca to Ab­b­Vie to Sang­amo have set up shop. Genen­tech, the OG res­i­dent of the neigh­bor­ing area, has re­cent­ly out­lined how it can con­tin­ue grow­ing its sprawl­ing cam­pus over the next two decades.

Even though the San Fran­cis­co penin­su­la boasts of the high­est sup­ply of lab space in the US at 21.8 mil­lion square feet, the life sci­ence in­dus­try’s ap­petite for space re­mains in­sa­tiable. A re­cent re­port not­ed that the va­can­cy rate for lab space sits at 7.5% — and pre-leas­es signed be­fore con­struc­tion even be­gins are com­mon.

In par­tic­u­lar, South San Fran­cis­co showed up in three of the five no­table lease trans­ac­tions spot­light­ed by the re­al es­tate ser­vices firm Cush­man & Wake­field. Cy­to­ki­net­ics, Lyell Im­munophar­ma and Am­gen all pre-leased to se­cure a spot.

IQHQ is al­ready op­er­at­ing along­side fel­low re­al es­tate gi­ants such as Kil­roy, Alexan­dria and Bio­med Re­al­ty, hav­ing man­aged the Gate­way of Pa­cif­ic and Kil­roy Oys­ter Point. Con­struc­tion for South City Sta­tion is sched­uled to start by the end of 2021.

Oth­er lo­ca­tions on its menu in­clude San Diego, Boston and the Gold­en Tri­an­gle in the Unit­ed King­dom.

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.