September 11, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
BOSTON – Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Company will take an additional 6,000 square feet of space in the crowded Kendall Square area magnifying the presence of the company’s new innovation center in the pharmaceutical hub of the east coast, the Boston Business Journal reported this morning.
This addition of space gives Eli Lilly about 23,000 square feet of space in Kendall Square. In addition to the new space, which Lilly expects to occupy by the end of the year, the company has plans to hire an additional 30 scientists and engineers to help with its drug delivery plans.
In May, Eli Lilly announced it will build a new drug delivery and device innovation center in Cambridge, Mass called the Lilly Cambridge Innovation Center. The new center was established as part of a push by Eli Lilly to be an industry leader in providing reliable drug and medical device delivery to the marketplace, John Lechleiter, president and chief executive officer of Lilly, said in a May statement.
“Locating in Cambridge is an important strategic move for achieving this goal, as it provides us access to a concentration of high-caliber academic institutions, cutting-edge life science and technology companies, and some of the world’s leading talent,” Lechleiter said at the time.
The innovation center is located in a Kendall Square property operated by San Diego-based BioMed Realty Trust BioMed owns more than 3 million square feet of property in the highly sought after area. The property which Eli Lilly has found space was once the home of Vertex Pharmaceuticals . Vertex vacated the space in 2013 when it moved a few miles into Boston.
Other companies that have taken up residence in the same Kendall Square office center include Compass Therapeutics and Semma Therapeutics. BioMed told the Journal that the building is about 75 percent occupied at this time.
One of the reasons for the greater Boston area becoming such a major hub in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries is the plethora of research universities in the area. Boston also has one of the highest educated workforces in the nation. Not only are smaller companies calling the Boston area home, but many larger and established pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer Inc. , GlaxoSmithKline , Takeda Pharmaceuticals , Sanofi , Biogen Idec, Inc. and Novartis AG have presences in the city. The close proximity of so many pharmaceutical and university laboratories provides researchers and scientists easy access to clinical studies and building partnerships between companies.
In addition to its Cambridge site, the company also maintains its 175,000 square foot Lilly Biotechnology Center in San Diego. Lilly moved into the San Diego area in 2004 when it bought Applied Molecular Evolution, Inc. The Lilly Biotechnology Center was created in 2009. At that site, the company has a focus on developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. In June, the Keck School of Medicine at USC established the USC Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (USC ATRI) in San Diego, close to the Lilly center. The focus is clinical research, intended to strengthen and complement USC’s existing Alzheimer’s research programs.
