Bayer Closes Doors to Mission Bay Site as Company Aims Focus on Other U.S. Locations

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In 2020, Bayer had over 19,000 employees in North America alone, with sites spread from coast to coast. Now, Bayer is shutting down one of those locations.

This week, the German drug company announced that it is closing the doors to its 'innovation hub' in Mission Bay.

"In order to make best use of our resources and diligently leverage the internal and external innovation potentially globally, we have decided to consolidate our research innovation activities in the U.S. in the Boston area …," the company said in a statement Monday. "As a consequence of this decision, we will close our Open Innovation Center - North America West in Mission Bay, San Francisco."

The CoLaborator space had an open floor plan with more than 30,000 square feet of shared, rented lab space. Before shutting down the space, Bayer welcomed companies ranging from start-ups to mature companies whose platforms, drug targets or drug candidates might align with Bayer's interests.

Companies currently leasing the space will now have to pack up and find a new location once Bayer’s lease at the site expires in October of this year.

Bayer had less than 20 employees left at the Mission Bay CoLaborator at the time of the announcement, all of whom are being encouraged to apply to other positions within Bayer, according to a company spokesperson.

The decision to shut down the Mission Bay location comes as the company aims to focus U.S. development operations in Berkeley and research in Boston.

Even though Bayer is bowing out of the Mission Bay area, that's not to say that the area isn't still buzzing with life sciences activity.

In May, Thermo Fisher Scientific announced its partnership with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to accelerate the development and manufacturing of cell-based therapies.

As part of the partnership, Thermo Fisher is planning to build a new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility on the university's Mission Bay campus.

The new site is expected to open in 2022 and will provide clinical and commercial cGMP cell therapy manufacturing services and technology development support to UCSF and other partners.

Other expansions that UCSF has taken hand in in Mission Bay include the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Cardiovascular Care and Prevention Center and the Bakar Precision Cancer Medicine Building.