Biomedical

Swiss pharmaceutical maker Novartis AG has renovated the historic 1927 New England Candy Co. factory in Cambridge to create a 500,000-sf biomedical research facility. The renovated building now houses labs, offices, breakout rooms, a 180-seat auditorium, two conference rooms, and a six-story atrium. Designed to foster interaction and collaboration, the labs and offices are co-located, with breakout rooms and kitchens on the perimeter of each floor. The building features state-of-the-art power, water, air handling, communications, and security systems.

The Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, Calif., is planning a $100-million expansion project. Doubling its existing space, the institute plans to add three buildings to its campus over the next ten years for a total footprint of 360,000 sf. Upon completion, the Buck Institute for Age Research will house 45 laboratories and a staff of 550 researchers.  

The University of Kansas celebrated the topping off of the new 205,000-sf Biomedical Research Center in Kansas City, Kansas, on June 28, 2005. The $57.2-million, five story project will house facilities for studying proteins, fertility and reproductive studies, strokes and the aging process, and a liver center. The project team consists of Cannon Design, Turner Construction, and GLPM. The finished facility will have 211,500 sf of floor area.

Baylor Health Care System is constructing a 2,200-sf cell processing lab at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. The $2.4-million GMP facility will house custom cancer vaccine manufacturing operations for Baylor subsidiary ODC Therapies. Sited in the Zelig H. Lieberman Research Building, the facility will help ODC continue the clinical trial process for patients in late stage malignant melanoma. Baylor plans to develop a significantly larger facility that includes office and lab space for ODC and other companies within two years.

Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Blood Systems Research Institute has opened a $5-million research wing at its San Francisco facility. Housing immunology and virology labs, the project doubled laboratory space to 10,000 sf by converting an existing auditorium located at the former Irwin Memorial headquarters. The wing will accommodate research in high-impact blood-borne infections such as the West Nile, hepatitis C, and HIV viruses.

Schering-Plough Corp. is consolidating biopharma research operations in Palo Alto, Calif. Subsidiary Canji Inc. will be relocated to merge with Schering-Plough's DNAX Research Institute to create an integrated company called Schering-Plough Biopharma. The 68,000-sf facility, where DNAX is located, will be fully operational by the third quarter of 2005. Schering-Plough Biopharma will focus primarily on biologics research including monoclonal antibodies and therapeutic proteins.

The recently completed $43.2-million Parnassus Services Seismic Replacement Building for the University of California, San Francisco is a six-story, 86,000-sf state-of-the-art laboratory facility built to support cancer, immunology, infectious disease, diabetes, hormone, reproductive biology, and cardiovascular research. Designed by Flad & Associates of San Francisco and constructed by McCarthy, the facility features a robotic cage wash and prep system.

The University of Texas Medical School at Houston broke ground in April 2005 on a new 208,500-sf research facility. The six-story, $78-million project will house four floors of research programs in neurobiology, the molecular biology of human pathogens, structural biology, and physiological genomics/systems biology. The top two floors of the facility will house a new animal care center to replace the one destroyed by Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.

The National Institutes of Health has selected Gilbane as construction manager for a proposed Integrated Research Facility (IRF) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Located on approximately six acres, the facility is intended to support research at BSL-2, BSL-3, and BSL-4. The proposed IRF may provide as much as 150,000 gsf of floor space, housing laboratory space for animal research, radiology equipment, mechanical space, and a waste-handling area.

The $100 million California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research is nearing completion at the Mission Bay campus in South San Francisco. The 153,000-sf facility is the first of four buildings that will make up the institute known as QB3 and is connected to U.C. San Francisco's Genentech Hall on all five stories. The Mission Bay facility will house a magnetic resonance imaging machine, a high through-put screening facility, a 250,000-compound chemical library for drug development, and 8,000 CPUs.

Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute opened the new 8,000-sf Center for Immunobiology and Vaccine Development in Oakland, Calif., in February 2005. The $5.6 million center was designed to accelerate research into serious infectious diseases for which no vaccines are available.

Translational Genomics (TGen) will officially dedicate its new $46 million headquarters on March 22, 2005. Located in Phoenix, Ariz., the TGen headquarters is sited in a 173,000-sf building, the first in a new downtown campus called the Phoenix Bioscience Center at Cooper Square. Other tenants in the building include the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), occupying the entire 23,000-sf second floor, and the International Genomics Consortium (IGC).

The University of Louisville is developing the Gheens Foundation Biosensor Reseach Center in Louisville. Funded by a $1.5 million pledge from the Gheens Foundation, the center will conduct biosensor research to create new devices and enable existing heart devices to function more compatibly with the human body. The research center will be part of the new $27.6 million Cardiovascular Innovation Institute (CII), a partnership between the University of Louisville and Jewish Hospital .

Boston University Medical Center has received final approval from the Boston Redevelopment Authority for its 410,000-sf BioSquare Phase II project in Boston. Funded by a $128 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the project will include a BSL-4 research laboratory and a 1,400-space parking garage. The facility will be part of a national network of laboratories dedicated to countering bioterror agents by developing drugs, treatments, and vaccines.

The University of Louisville has received $10.25 million from a bill approved by the U.S. Senate to fund the construction of a 134,700-sf biomedical research building. The facility will be constructed on the university's health sciences campus. The funding is part of $28 million the university will receive to support research initiatives.