Cancer Drug Maker Buying 16 Acres for $100M Campus

LYNNWOOD, WA-Opus Northwest LLC is selling about half of the buildable land at its Northpointe Corporate Center development here to a cancer drug maker that plans to spend $100 million expanding and consolidating its Puget Sound area operations at the site. The buyer is Berlex, the US affiliate of publicly traded Schering AG Germany.A source at Berlex tells GlobeSt.com that the first phase will be pure expansion while future phases are planned to take in existing Puget Sound-area operations now in leased facilities. All told, the company has room for some 360,000 sf of development on the site it has agreed to purchase, according to Gary Bullington of Cushman & Wakefield, which has the marketing assignment for the overall development.The first phase will be a $60-million manufacturing facility of between 85,000 sf and 95,000 sf. David Carlson, Barley’s VP of biologics manufacturing and logistics, says the facility will ensure that the company can provide an increasing supply of Leukine (sargramostim) for current markets in cancer care and a potential new global market for the drug as a treatment for Crohn’s disease.Berlex currently manufacturers Leukine at a leased facility in the Seattle area and also leases lab and office space in Bothell from Amgen. Company plans are to eventually develop two additional buildings at Northpointe for those operations in a second phase of development valued at between $20 million and $40 million, a company source tells GlobeSt.com.”A key consideration for Berlex and its parent company in the site selection process has been to retain our existing team of commercial biologics manufacturing professionals,” says Carlson. “This team provides an ideal nucleus for the global supply center for Leukine and future biopharmaceuticals which may be developed and commercialized by the company for worldwide markets.”For Opus, the proposed land sale accounts for about half of expected 588,000 sf of buildings that can be built at Northpointe. Moreover, it may lead to future land sales to like-minded companies. “There might be companies in related businesses that might want to be in proximity,” Opus’ VP of real estate Tom Parsons tells GlobeSt.com.Regardless, significant land sales have been a long time coming for Opus’ Northpointe project. Parsons says the company had the property under contract in 1998 and completed the bulk of the entitlement process and wetlands mitigation in December 2001, just as the market was withering. Heretofore, there has been only one development at the site, a 75,000-sf build-to-suit-to-sale for Cypress Semiconductor.Assuming this deal closes, there is room for another 325,000 sf of development at Northpointe, a 90-acre park with about 40 acres of buildable land. That space is currently spread out in five buildings, but Parsons says buildings could be combined to accommodate a larger user. “We’re driven by the approved FAR, not necessarily individual building designs,” says Parsons.Opus Northpointe Corporate Center is located north of Seattle at the confluence of Interstates 5 and 405. The park provides infrastructure with fiber optic and telecommunication capacity to handle engineering, biomedical and high tech companies. For those familiar with the layout of the Northpointe, Berlex purchased the land for buildings G, E and F, each of which were planned as 120,000 sf projects, says Bullington, who is marketing the development with partner Tom Bohman.A Berlex source says the company hopes to break ground later this year and complete construction of the first building in 2005 or 2006. Licensing the facility for production of Leukine could take another 12 to 24 months, according to the company.Berlex established operations in Washington in 2002 with about 150 employees and now employs slightly more than 200 related to the company’s oncology business unit, its clinical development team, and its production plant, which is the company’s only commercial biotechnology manufacturing supply plant. All told, Berlex employs nearly 2,500 people in the US in research, development and commercial operations in New Jersey, Washington and California.