Pittsburgh to get big infusion of new commercial lab space
A bolus of commercial research lab space will hit the Pittsburgh real estate market in the next few years — and that’s good news for the city’s emerging knowledge economy.
Pairing scientists with entrepreneurs in the same building is the formula the University of Pittsburgh and hospital giant UPMC are touting to foster the creation of life science startup companies. The template has been wildly successful in cities such as Boston and San Francisco — helping turn medical discoveries into drugs and medical devices, a strategy that entrepreneurs everywhere dream of copying.
And the Steel City has a shot at making it work, serial entrepreneur David Lucchino said Monday after a talk at the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Pittsburgh is well positioned to be part of that proposition,” said Mr. Lucchino, a Highland Park native. “It’s a critical first step.”
There is very little commercially available lab space in Pittsburgh; most of it is controlled by universities and public companies.
Mr. Lucchino is co-founder, president and CEO of Frequency Therapeutics, a life science startup in Woburn, Mass., that plans to market a drug to improve hearing. The drug is in phase two clinical trials. He is also an adviser to Pitt’s life science startup accelerator LifeX, located on the South Side.
Mr. Lucchino, 51, credits his recovery from multiple myeloma to an anti-cancer agent developed in the Boston area — and for spurring his interest in life science company startups.
About 713,000 square feet of lab space is either planned or under development in the Bloomfield-Oakland neighborhoods, with the UPMC Immune Transplant and Therapy Center in Bloomfield leading the way with 245,000-square-feet of planned lab space for three physician researchers.
An additional 108,000-square-feet of lab space is being built on speculation that it will be snapped up by researchers.
The developer of the UPMC Bloomfield center, Baltimore-based Wexford Science + Technology LLC, is also developing a 10-story tower 2 miles away at 3440 Forbes Ave. that will be a similar lab-office complex.
About half of the 180,000-squarefoot Forbes Avenue tower will be dedicated to lab space, said Michael Dembert, director, development at Wexford Science. The project’s appeal: researchers and entrepreneurs working in the same space.
“It’s the synergy, the dynamic between having the co-location,” Mr. Dembert said. “There’s definitely a demand in the market for it.”
Shadyside-based Walnut Capital is planning a 10-story building on Fifth Avenue near Carlow University that will accommodate lab space, depending on tenant preferences.
About 280,000 square feet of office space in that building could be used for lab space for potential research partners UPMC and University of Pittsburgh, Walnut Capital President Todd Reidbord told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year.
By comparison, the life science company hub in Boston, where Mr. Lucchino formed startup companies, has 20.6 million square feet of lab space. That’s forecast to grow by 55% to 32 million square feet in and around the city by 2024, according to a new report by Chicago-based real estate services company Cushman & Wakefield.
Like other life science epicenters, the Boston area offers key entrepreneurial resources, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Pittsburgh should build on its strengths: Carnegie Mellon’s computer engineering and Pitt’s health sciences schools, Mr. Lucchino said.
“Pittsburgh has always kind of gotten it,” he said. “But the universities have been a real catalyst for the knowledge economy.”