What happened in Mission Bay? Plus: exoneration at Stanford and 5 names to know at Amazon

Good morning, and welcome back to Go West.

I want to devote the top of this edition to some musings about the biotech scene in Mission Bay, the neighborhood on the water on the eastern edge of San Francisco, due south of the bustling financial district. Ron Leuty, a reporter for the San Francisco Business Times, got me thinking about Mission Bay with a smart observation that started a conversation on Twitter.

These are boom times for Mission Bay. The Golden State Warriors will soon start playing in a shiny new arena. Dropbox picked the neighborhood as home for its new headquarters, and so did Uber, which will shell out $86 per square foot annually for its new space.

Largely left out of the party is biotech.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. In 2003, the University of California, San Francisco, opened its first research building on its Mission Bay campus — the first seed of what local boosters pledged to grow into a dense thicket of life sciences companies to rival the biotech ecosystem rising up near MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass.

But today? “It’s pretty clear that it hasn’t fulfilled its promise as the West Coast Kendall Square,” said Steve Karp, who supports startups and entrepreneurs at the nonprofit affiliate of the trade group the California Life Sciences Association.

Mission Bay is still home to several of biotech’s buzziest companies. Among them: Twist Bioscience, thought to be the world’s most prolific supplier of synthetic genes; Vir Biotechnology, a young startup with high-profile backing and a stacked lineup of drugs for infectious diseases; and Nektar, a biotech working on drugs for pain, cancer, and autoimmune diseases. And there are a few nests in the neighborhood to nurture young startups, like a “CoLaborator” run by the big drug company Bayer and a “garage” of office and lab space on UCSF’s campus.

"But if I look at the number of companies that are located in Mission Bay directly … there really aren’t very many — and what was envisioned perhaps as a home for startups, that hasn’t really come to fruition,” Karp told me.

Joaquín Torres, director of San Francisco's Office of Economic and Workforce Development, told me the life sciences industry can be found across the city, not just in one neighborhood. "We are proud of the incredible innovations coming from these businesses and will continue to support the sector as it evolves," he said.

Now, onto the latest headlines

After last fall’s CRISPR’d babies controversy, Stanford officials launched an investigation into what several of the university’s high-profile researchers knew about Chinese scientist (and former Stanford postdoc) He Jiankui’s widely criticized experiment. Yesterday, the university announced that it has exonerated all three of those researchers— most notably Stephen Quake, a bioengineering professor, whose interactions with He were documented in a riveting New York Timesstory earlier this week.

Antibiotic development is a tough business. The latest sign of the challenge? Achaogen, a South San Francisco-based biotech which recently won FDA approval for its new antibiotic, just filed for bankruptcy, Endpoints News reports.

If you don’t already know the name Daphne Koller, you should. She’s a machine learning researcher who a year ago launched a new South San Francisco startup called Insitro. Now, Insitro has landed a big deal with Bay Area-based drug developer Gilead Sciences. My STAT colleague Matt Herper and I talked to Koller and the VCs and executives who backed her about what’s at stake in a collaboration that’s poised to offer a test for whether artificial intelligence can remake drug development.

Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, a public hospital in San Francisco named for benefactor and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, has been the subject of lots of bad press in recent months for sending huge surprise medical bills to its patients. Now, the hospital is changing its policies: It will set a limit on how much patients could end up paying out of pocket. And it will no longer bill patients for the balance that their insurer won’t pay. Read more from Vox’s Sarah Kliff, whose reporting first called attention to the hospital’s controversial billing practices.

Amazon is the subject of the latest installment of STAT’s series of stories highlighting the people leading Big Tech’s push into medicine health. My STAT colleague Casey Ross mapped out five names you should know at the online retailer. Among them are a former FDA official, a neuroradiologist, and a machine learning expert.

In Sacramento, there’s a fight underway over a bill making its way through the legislature that would exempt public university researchers from certain elements of public records laws — allowing them to refuse to turn over certain correspondences, data, and interviews. Supporters of the legislation say it would protect researchers who feel harassed or overwhelmed by public requests. But opponents worry it could eliminate a vital accountability check on the research being conducted at public research institutions, the magazine Undark reports.

The Los Angeles Times just won a Pulitzer Prize, in the investigative reporting category, for uncovering allegations that a gynecologist sexually abused hundreds of students over three decades at a clinic at the University of Southern California. The series of stories, the first of which you can read here, triggered law enforcement investigations and led to the resignation of USC’s president.

Watch this IPO

Cortexyme, a South San Francisco-based company, made headlines earlier this year when it published an early-stage study that found a link between a gum disease-causing bacteria and Alzheimer’s disease. Now, the company is going public, with plans to test the idea in humans.

The company, which aims to raise about $86 million, also announced yesterday that it’s screening Alzheimer’s patients for its lead drug. Watch in the coming weeks for a more detailed filing that will spell out how valuable Cortexyme believes its shares are.

Coming up next week

States all over the country are trying to figure what to do about clinics that offer unproven, expensive, and sometimes even dangerous stem cell therapies to patients. It’s a particularly thorny problem in California, where such clinics are flourishing. Earlier this year, a state lawmaker introduced legislation that would create a regulatory panel to police these clinics. Next Tuesday, the bill will get its first hearing by a legislative committee, reports David Jensen, the stem cell watchdog blogger behind California Stem Cell Report.