PASADENA, Calif., Feb. 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE:ARE), the first, preeminent, longest-tenured and pioneering owner, operator and developer of collaborative life science, agtech and advanced technology mega campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, today announced that AstraZeneca, a top 20 global biopharmaceutical company and longstanding Alexandria tenant, is investing $300 million in a next-generation cell therapy manufacturing facility at 9950 Medical Center Drive on the Alexandria Center® for Life Science – Shady Grove mega campus in the Rockville submarket. Last year, AstraZeneca executed a 13-year lease term for the entire 84,264 RSF Class A+ property, which runs through June 30, 2036. Since 2007, Alexandria has provided AstraZeneca with essential and integrated manufacturing, laboratory and adjacent nontechnical infrastructure that currently aggregates nearly 417,000 RSF on campuses across its Maryland, Greater Boston and New York City clusters.
The American Cancer Society projects over 2 million cancer cases and over 600,000 cancer deaths in the United States for 2024. However, the emergence of innovative new classes of medicines such as engineered cell therapies, including chimeric antigen receptor therapies (CAR-T) and T-cell receptor therapies (TCR-T), have driven recent declines in cancer mortality. The purpose-built facility at 9950 Medical Center Drive will support AstraZeneca’s mission-critical biomanufacturing of T-cell therapies for its clinical trials in oncology and the future commercial supply of its broader pipeline of lifesaving cell therapies. AstraZeneca’s significant investment in the facility at the Alexandria Center for Life Science – Shady Grove mega campus is expected to create more than 150 highly skilled jobs and aims to accelerate the company’s ambition to make next-generation cell therapy a reality, as well as to help ready the company to scale and meet the demands of patients worldwide.
Alexandria has been at the vanguard and heart of growing, shaping and leading the Maryland life science ecosystem since entering the Rockville submarket in 1996, and today its dominant market presence in the high-barrier-to-entry submarket is centered around its world-class Shady Grove mega campus. The premier well-amenitized campus consists of nearly 1.2 million RSF in operation, 96.6% of which is occupied, and approximately 807,000 RSF in current and future …