April 6, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
San Diego-based BioMed Realty, a company focused on developing and managing real estate properties for life science companies, announced today that Illumina had inked a 10-year lease at BioMed’s i3 campus.
Illumina, also headquartered in San Diego, focuses on developing and marketing DNA sequencing and array technologies. It is expanding its headquarters into the i3 campus, which is 316,000 square feet that is currently being constructed in San Diego’s University Towne Centre (UTC).
BioMed Realty and Illumina have a solid partnership, with this lease being the third major lease for new construction the two companies have signed in the last 15 months. Previous deals included build-to-suit lease agreements for 360,000 square feet at Lincoln Centre in Foster City, Calif. and 155,000 square feet at Grana Park in Cambridge, U.K.
“Expanding to i3 enables us to continue our growth in San Diego, our home city and a source of top talent in our industry,” said Marc Stapley, executive vice president, chief administrative officer and chief financial officer at Illumina, in a statement. “i3 creates a near-term opportunity for us to accommodate our growing teams in a location very close to our headquarters, where we expect to reach full occupancy in the next year.”
BioMed Realty currently has 18 million square feet of rental space worldwide, with major holdings in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cambridge, Mass., and the U.K. Scott Altick, vice president and market lead for San Francisco at BioMed Realty, told BioSpace in a March interview, that the Bay Area and South San Francisco were “historically the main nucleus of the biotech industry in the Bay Area, really driven by proximity to the research institutions, Stanford, University of California Berkeley, and the University of California San Francisco.”
Current trends in biotech develop include what are called “amenity spaces,” which primarily refers to having more than a lone facility surrounded by a sea of parking spaces. “What we mean by this is that these companies are basically competing for top talent in the Bay Area in the biotech community just like they are in the tech community—the Apples, the Googles, the Facebook—and the culture created around their campuses with the amenities they have. It’s just not them having a cafeteria and conferencing area. For us, it’s the future, creating collaborative spaces creatively.”
Those spaces often involve outdoor amphitheaters, playing fields, and creative meeting spaces and recreational features. The idea is to create a culture of collaboration through creative workspace design.
“We are thrilled to welcome Illumina to our i3 campus,” said Alan Gold, BioMed Realty’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “Illumina’s unmatched success and reputation as a global leader in genomics is the perfect fit for this iconic campus, which will bring together the key elements needed for their employees to thrive—flexible design, great amenities and easy access to transportation. We look forward to supporting Illumina’s growth in San Diego as part of our continued and expanded relationship.”
When finished, the i3 campus will be made up of three 100,000 square foot buildings that can be customized. As part of BioMed Realty’s approach, it will have both indoor and outdoor amenities, fuel cell energy generation, and operable windows. They will meet and exceed the LEED Platinum certification.
