Booming Shire Expands Massachusetts Footprint by Leasing Two Ex-Cubist Buildings
March 14, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Dublin-based Shire Pharmaceuticals recently leased two buildings in Lexington, Mass. formerly owned by Cubist Pharmaceuticals .
The new space brings Shire’s total square footage in Lexington to over 1 million. The two buildings, located on Hayden Avenue, have a combined square footage of over 177,000. Company spokeswoman Katie Joyce declined to say what the new space would be used for, only saying that “all considerations are on the table.”
In January, Shire announced that, after a six-month courtship, it was buying Bannockburn, Ill.-based Baxalta . It’s possible that the expanded facilities in Lexington will accommodate some of the 16,000 additional employees it will acquire in the merger.
The Boston Business Journal notes that Shire’s presence in Massachusetts grew by more than 2,600 people, or about 85 percent, in 2015. It also expanded its footprint by 15 percent to 922,000 square feet. Baxalta already has a 200,000 square foot facility in Kendall Square in Cambridge, which the company indicates it plans to keep.
Analysts speculate on whether Shire will be acquiring another company this year, perhaps Cambridge-based Biogen .
“Investors think Biogen’s top priority should be to acquire an asset that will have meaningful top-line growth within the next 18 to 36 months,” said Asthika Goonewardene, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, in July 2015 after results of a survey found that more than 30 investors thought Biogen should buy a company fast to boost its revenue. “So, not one of those really small biotech companies will only deliver something very promising five to seven years down the line.”
And while it was still wooing Baxter , Shire acquired Burlington, Mass.-based Dyax Corporation for about $5.9 billion in November 2015. Dyax focuses on plasma kallikrein (pKal) inhibitors for the treatment of HAE, a rare, debilitating genetic inflammatory condition. Not a particularly large company, Dyax reportedly employed about 124 people.
Cubist was acquired by Merck & Co. in 2015 for $8.4 billion, and had about 600 employees in Lexington at that time. By the time the deal closed, there were only about 424 people working at the Lexington site.
Although Shire’s corporate headquarters are in Ireland due to a lower corporate tax rate, its office facilities in Ireland are only about 34,000 square feet. Shire will have about 1.3 million square feet spread around Lexington, Cambridge, Waltham, North Reading, Belmont and Burlington, all in Massachusetts. This gives it the second largest footprint among local independent biotech companies in the area. The top spot is taken by Biogen, which has 1.8 million square feet in Cambridge, Weston and Somerville.
Massachusetts’ largest biotech employer is Paris-based Sanofi , but does not report its facility sizes in its federal filings.
Shire is currently trading for $161.88. Shares traded on Aug. 3, 2015 for $268.08, dropped to $150.40 on Feb. 8, 2016 and popped up a bit to $163.33 on Feb. 18.