ABL Takes Full Building Lease for HQ

SHADY GROVE, MD-Biotech firm Advanced BioScience Laboratories hassigned a full building lease at the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center,where will occupy the three-story, 72,000-square foot building at 9800Medical Center Dr. Its new space will serve as the company’sadministrative headquarters, housing R&D and cGMP manufacturingactivities. It is one of the largest leases signed by a biotechcompany in recent years, according to Robert Scheer and Nate Crowe ofScheer Partners, which represented ABL in the deal.

Owned by Alexandria Real Estate Equities, the new headquarters is partof a four-building, 265,000-square-foot campus whose tenants includethe National Institutes of Health, Amplimmune, Canon US LifeSciences and Sanaria. The company plans to spend $10 million for abuild out.

Like most other industries, biotech activity slowed during therecession, but new activity is slowly beginning to translate into hardreal estate deals. Also, government spending is having an impact as well, Henry Bernstein, a principal with Scheer Partners, toldGlobeSt.com in an earlier interview. “I would say there is about half a million square feet worth of deals in the market that will land in 2010 and 2011,” he says, including twogovernment mandates from the NIH and NCI.