San Francisco’s drive to turn the Mission Bay area into a technology-transfer hub has been boosted by Pfizer’s decision to move one of its research centres to the site.

In early 2010, the Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center will move into newly constructed lab facilities near the Mission Bay research complex run by the University of California, San Francisco. About 100 of the centre’s employees will move there from its current base in South San Francisco.

Five years after the university opened facilities at Mission Bay, biotech firms are finally trickling in. In June, Pfizer, which is headquartered in New York, agreed a US$9.5-million, three-year deal for research collaborations with Mission Bay’s California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences.