Health History | Gilead — The Vintage Park Lot That Kept an Antiviral Lab in Foster City
· 1987-6
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Health History | Gilead — The Vintage Park Lot That Kept an Antiviral Lab in Foster City
kevin
People treat Gilead as a campus that could have sat anywhere on the Peninsula.
The lab that mattered settled on Lakeside Drive.
Michael L. Riordan founded the company on 22 June 1987 under the name Oligogen, a reference to the short strands of DNA he meant to aim at genetic sequences.
He was twenty-nine.
A Florida nonprofit already used a similar name.
Riordan paid $1,000 in 1987 dollars for the right to call the firm Gilead Sciences.
In 1988, after an early $2 million from venture backers, the company moved into Foster City's Vintage Park district.
It has not left.
333 Lakeside Drive is still the worldwide headquarters.
The first FDA-approved product, cidofovir sold as Vistide, arrived in 1996.
Tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, sold as Viread, followed in 2001 and became a backbone of HIV maintenance.
Later combination tablets — Atripla, Truvada, Genvoya, Biktarvy — were designed and registered from the same lot.
Sofosbuvir-based hepatitis C regimens and the remdesivir program also ran through Foster City.
The mechanism is not one molecule.
It is a decision, made the year after incorporation, to keep a small antiviral shop beside the San Mateo Bridge rather than rent a larger lab in South San Francisco.
From the public sidewalk on Lakeside Drive the buildings read as an ordinary suburban campus.
Do not enter the research wings.
The pin is the frontage of the lot the company has occupied since 1988.
Photo: Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Foster City, May 2011).
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