J.david Gladstone Institutes

J. David Gladstone Institutes is a nonprofit biomedical research organization based in San Francisco that serves as a prime recipient on federal research grants and contracts, delivering specialized laboratory services and advancing research across neuroscience, immunology, cardiovascular disease, aging, and infectious disease. The organization competes full-and-open, without set-asides, and operates almost exclusively in the federal grant space—most of its recent activity is structured as project grants and sub-recipient arrangements under prime awards to other universities rather than as standalone contract awardees.

The institute's customer base is heavily concentrated in the National Institutes of Health, with the National Institute on Aging and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases anchoring the award portfolio. Recent prime grant awards span research into Alzheimer's disease mechanisms (including APOE4 effects on brain metabolism and network hyperexcitability), HIV latency and cure strategies, bacteriophage therapy for multidrug-resistant pathogens, and vitamin biology therapeutics. Representative recent grants include a $10.8 million NIA award to investigate vascular-immune mechanisms in cerebral amyloid angiopathy (with sub-awards to Rush University Medical Center and UC Irvine), a $3.6 million NIAID grant on transcriptional regulation of regulatory T cells (with a sub-award to UCSF), and a $2.1 million NIAID award on hybrid mRNA vaccine technology for HIV (with Massachusetts General Hospital's Batista Lab as sub-awardee). The institute also receives contract awards from the Department of Veterans Affairs for flow cytometry core services at the VA San Francisco Medical Center—two sole-source purchase orders in September 2025 totaling approximately $30 thousand for laboratory instrumentation access.

The institute's research footprint is characterized by deep collaboration with academic partners. The sub-award portfolio shows recurring engagements with Stanford University (Ryan Corces on ArchR software maintenance and single-cell profiling), UCSF (University of California, San Francisco on immune phenotyping, metabolic imaging, and HIV reservoir studies), and specialized research centers including UC San Diego's National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, and Weill Cornell University. Gladstone's own investigators—particularly Katerina Akassoglou (neuroimmunology), Alexander Marson (CRISPR and T cell engineering), Nevan Krogan (proteomics and viral-host interactions), Steven Finkbeiner (neurodegeneration), and Melanie Ott (virology)—lead or co-lead multiple multi-institution projects and appear as sub-awardees or co-investigators on dozens of NIH grants across the NIA, NIAID, NINDS, and NHLBI portfolios.

Over the past five years, annual award volume has grown from 35 awards in 2022 to 48 in 2025, with 12 awards recorded in the first half of 2026. The combined potential value across the award portfolio is $8.1 million, though obligated dollars total $953.2 million, reflecting the long-term nature of multi-year research grants. Approximately 27 awards reach completion in the next twenty-four months, representing a recompete window of modest immediate urgency at the contract level but broader significance across the grant renewal cycle. The institute does not serve as a prime contractor on major federal IDIQs or GWACs; its role in the federal marketplace is as a research performer—a nonprofit recipient institution delivering advanced biomedical research in partnership with leading academic medical centers and specialized research organizations.