Illumina Invests in European HQ in Cambridge, Heads MIT's “Smartest Company” List
June 25, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
San Diego, Calif.-based Illumina and BioMed Realty Trust, Inc., also in San Diego, announced today that Illumina had signed a 20-year lease for a 155,000-square foot research building in Cambridge, England.
The new Cambridge site will be Illumina’s European headquarters.
BioMed bought the land for the project from The Welding Institute, which enlarged BioMed’s Granta Park campus in Cambridge. Granta Park is a scientific research center about eight miles from Cambridge University. It currently is made up of 472,200 square feet of laboratory and office space.
In its 2014 second quarter report, BioMed Realty reported that it had started a fully-leased build-to-suit project for Takeda Pharmaceuticals in the same area. This lease was for about 42,400 square feet of lab and office space and will last for 16 years.
BioMed Realty is a major company in the area of life sciences real estate. In March 2015 BioSpace reported that the company had reacquired 313,000 square feet of space in Cambridge, Mass. (not to be confused with the British town) when Vertex Pharmaceuticals terminated three leases. BioMed owns more than three million square feet of laboratory and office space in the Boston/Cambridge area, including a facility on Kendall Street that Baxter Healthcare’s spinoff, Baxalta, occupies.
“Illumina and BioMed Realty’s commitment to building a new state-of-the-art facility in Cambridge is great news for our area,” said George Freeman, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Life Sciences at the U.K. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department of Health in a statement. “This is a strong endorsement of the UK’s Life Science Industrial Strategy and leadership in driving toward better treatments for people with cancers and rare diseases.”
Illumina was recently ranked on Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s list of “smartest companies,” edging out Tesla Motors (TSLA), Google Inc., Samsung, and Salesforce.com (CRM). The list, published by MIT’s Massachusetts Technology Review, focuses less on reputation and patents, but a more global sense of how the company’s work is affecting its field.
“Familiar names such as Apple and Facebook aren’t on this list because reputation doesn’t matter. We’re highlighting where important innovations are happening right now,” wrote Massachusetts Technology Review executive editor Brian Bergstein. “We didn’t count patents or Ph.D.s; instead, we asked whether a company had made strides in the past year that will define its field. The biggest of these strides happened at Illumina, which is driving down the price of DNA sequencing to levels that will change the practice of medicine.”
Nonetheless, it was noted that Illumina’s senior vice president and chief commercial officer, Christian Henry, recently made a sale of 5,084 of Illumina shares based on an average price of $221.1 per share, a current value of $1,123,909.
Octafinance notes Henry has been actively selling company stock, which, it states, “could show his lack of confidence in Illumina Inc.’s future and stock price.” However, 24 leadings analysts project future earnings per share (EPS) of $3.43 for the year 2015.
Illumina stock is currently selling for $220.68. It has been on a fairly steady rise for the last year from a low of $149.12 on Oct. 14, 2014.
Zacks recently downgraded Illumina shares from a “strong-buy” to a “hold” rating. Leerink Swann analysts continued a “positive” rating and set a price target of $225 on Wednesday, June 3. BTIG Research analysts repeated a “buy” rating and a price target of $240 on May 26.
As Rumors Swirl About GlaxoSmithKline Bid, Who Could Suitors Be?
Rumors are swirling that Swiss-based Roche and U.S.-based Johnson & Johnson are eying the U.K. company for approximately $143 billion. But Roche and J&J aren’t the only companies though who have been thought could go after the elephant that is Glaxo.
Last month there was buzz that Pfizer Inc. was considering acquiring Glaxo, a year after it failed to acquire AstraZeneca PLC . Just this month over a third of respondents in a poll conducted by BioSpace believe that AstraZeneca PLC could be in the running to acquire struggling GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
So BioSpace wants to ask our readers again what they predict for this new dealmaking bonanza. Will Glaxo go—and if so, to whom?