Industry News

The Indian School of Business is under construction in Hyderabad, the "Silicon Valley" of India. The campus encompasses 660,000 sf and is located on 250 acres. Each classroom will be fully wired, with a computer and video conferencing capability at each desk. The communications network will be set up to ensure instant global connectivity. The school will accommodate a large number of formal and informal break-out space. John Portman & Associates designed the school, which will be the first fully air conditioned school in India.

Genentech Inc. is in the midst of a $17 million cGMP (current Good Manufacturing Practice) warehouse and administrative facilities expansion and renovation at its Vacaville campus. The new 42,000-sf cGMP Building 3A warehouse, adjacent to the existing manufacturing facility's warehouse, will include 2,000 sf of Class 100 cleanroom space for material sampling. The remaining space will house warehouse specialized material storage, and office space. A 50,000-sf expansion of Building 4A will provide administrative office space and a new computer room.

Acterna, a Germantown telecommunications company, plans to consolidate its 4,000 employees, currently situated at five Germantown locations, at a new 45-acre corporate campus at the Milestone site in Germantown. Current plans include two initial buildings totaling 280,000 sf, with a potential for 700,000 sf at final build-out. The Peterson Cos., based in Fairfax, Va., is developing the property.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Food and Drug Administration (FDA) consolidated headquarters and laboratory campus broke ground recently at White Oak, a base realignment and closure site formerly home to the Naval Laboratory campus. The FDA, currently housed in more than 40 buildings at 18 different locations in the Washington, D.C., region will use 130 acres of the 670-acre campus.

BioReliance opened a new $24 million, $58,000-sf facility in late September 2000 to provide large-scale, viral gene therapy and drug manufacturing services to biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The company will provide bulk manufacturing of the human smallpox vaccine for OraVax, a Cambridge, Mass., biopharmaceutical firm that was recently awarded a $343 million contract for the vaccine by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.