Harbor JV Buys LA Office Building for Lab Conversion

A joint venture of Harbor Associates and Platform Ventures has acquired a 119K SF office building in Los Angeles for conversion into lab space that will become a global headquarters for gene therapy innovator A2 Biotherapeutics (A2 Bio).

Adler Realty sold the two-story, multi-tenant property for $19.3M, with Citizen Bank providing the joint venture with a $29.3M loan for the transaction.

A2 Bio has signed an 11-year lease for 76K SF in the building at 30601 Agoura Road, north of Santa Monica in Agoura Hills.

The company is planning to use about three-quarters of space for labs and R&D, with the rest configured as a collaboration space. A2 Bio expects to move into the building in 2023.

“Agoura Hills is more convenient than Thousand Oaks for biotech recruiting talent from San Fernando Valley, Downtown and West Los Angeles,” said Rich McEvoy, principal of Harbor Associates, in a statement. “We were able to identify a well-located building that was prime for multi-tenant life sciences conversion while helping A2 Bio meet its business objectives.”

Agoura Hills is in proximity to the Conejo Valley life sciences cluster in SoCal, which includes about 70 life sciences cluster, which includes major biotech and pharma firms including Amgen, Baxter, Allergen and Takeda.

A partnership of Harbor Associates and Gemdale also own an adjacent property, Agoura Hills Business Park, a 114K office campus. The partnership recapitalized the property in a $29.7M deal.

The Agoura Hills Business Park previously was acquired in 2020 by the joint venture of Harbor and Kansas City- based Platform Ventures. Platform exited the investment in the recapitalization.

In March, A2 Bio which has focused on gene therapy for cancer tumors, published two academic papers, in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer and Science Translational Medicine, detailing key preclinical data on the company’s proprietary Tmod cell therapy platform.

A2 Bio has developed a therapy that identifies tumors that develop in patients that carry specific genetic deletions. The Tmod therapy exploits these deletions to selectively destroy tumors while sparing normal cells.

“These two papers present a large body of preclinical in vitro and in vivo evidence that supports the robust, highly selective function of the Tmod system, a new approach to cancer therapy that addresses head-on the central problem of oncology—the ability of cancer medicines to distinguish between tumor and normal cells,” said Dr. Alexander Kamb, A2 Bio’s chief scientific officer, in a release.