Google's Verily HQ in the Peninsula Needs More Time, Company Seeks Timeline Extension
August 22, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SOUTH SAN FRACNSICO – Verily, Google ’s life sciences division, needs more time. Not time to develop some of its moonshot product goals, but time to complete the construction of its new campus in the Bay Area.
The company’s real estate developer is seeking to continue its development agreement through 2018. Google initially snagged a 10-year development lease for the property in 2006. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a company known for development of life sciences properties, said in a letter to the city that the company is looking to postpone the project completion while it moves into the property and “further defines its vision for their new headquarters,” the San Mateo Daily Journal reported.
“We need to extend the development agreement in order to allow enough time for them to settle into their new facilities and make plans for their next phase of growth which will require construction of the final planned commercial building on site,” the real estate developers said in the letter, the Journal reported.
The space Verily is developing is a 15.75 acre property that is expected to include 534,000 square feet of research and development space split between four buildings.
In March, Verily Life Sciences, made a big move by securing the 400,000 square-foot space formerly occupied by Onyx Pharmaceuticals in the heart of San Francisco’s biotech industry.
Verily is the first of Google’s many “moon shot” companies to stand alone under its new Alphabet umbrella. Verily’s focus seems to be a combination of merging big data and healthcare, while at the same time developing various biological data monitors. Verily has developed several relationships with larger biotech companies, including Novartis , DexCom and Sanofi (SNY). One project the company is developing is a wearable contact lens that will read glucose levels in diabetic patients.
However, questions have arisen about the feasibility of some of Verily’s designs. A recent StatNews report questioned Verily’s products and found the most prominently talked-about ones are “plagued by serious, if not fatal, scientific shortcomings.”
Alexandria Real Estate Equities works in major biotech hubs, such as San Francisco and the Boston area. Last week, the company announced its plans to create another biotech mecca in Massachusetts. In April, the company secured $310 million from the Bank of China for new office development that will have Bristol-Myers Squibb as an anchor tenant. The site will be part of the Alexandria Center at Kendall Square, an eight building campus in the heart of the busiest pharmaceutical hub in the U.S. Other tenants on the campus include bluebird bio and Sanofi Genzyme . The new facility is about 431,000 square feet. Bristol-Myers will take up about 208,000 square feet of the site.