Latest Reports

Werfen opened a $50 million research and development facility in December of 2024 in Bedford, Mass. Designed by Maugel DeStefano Architects, the 169,500-sf building provides a dynamic new home for the company's Hemostasis and Acute Care Diagnostics Technology Center. The structure's first two floors offer a total of 27,500 sf of lab space and 91,000 sf of office space, perched over a 51,000-sf parking area for 160 vehicles.

The fast-moving nature of biotechnology innovation means architects and designers for Regeneron have to plan for researchers’ requirements to change by the time new laboratories open on the Tarrytown, N.Y., campus. The campus is undergoing a $1.8 billion expansion, adding 900,000 sf of new laboratory and office space, along with additional parking, amenities, and infrastructure to support research and development. The new laboratories will be able to evolve as the biotech industry finds new ways to use artificial intelligence, CRISPR genome editing technology, robotics, and other advances.

Rice University’s Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science, which opened in September 2023, is a 250,000-gsf center for advanced materials sciences designed to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration by bringing together researchers in the fields of chemistry, biomolecular engineering, physics, and nanoengineering who had previously been scattered across 13 different buildings around the campus. 

The vision of biomedical research as a collective effort is resoundingly clear in the $237.5 million Pelotonia Research Center, the first building to be completed in the 350-plus-acre Carmenton district on the campus of The Ohio State University (Ohio State) in Columbus. Opened in May 2023, the center integrates almost 100,000 sf of wet labs, 25,000 sf of computational labs, and 20,000 sf of core labs in a single facility designed to host interdisciplinary collaborations and public-private initiatives that focus on solving some of the most critical health challenges. With life science as the backbone of the research endeavor, current projects range from modeling cancer progressions to 3D printing of patient-specific anatomic models. 

How do you know if an existing building has what it takes to house a new specialty laboratory? The planning effort has to go beyond the typical process for a conventional lab renovation of defining program needs and investigating existing conditions. It must instead drill down into the unique aspects of the specialized environment, including illuminating the key attributes of the already-occupied and operational facility.