UC San Diego, Wexford Partner on Life Science Hub

Wexford Science & Technology LLC has entered a public-private partnership with the University of California San Diego to double the size of the Science Research Park on UC San Diego’s east campus.

The Science Research Park currently occupies nine acres encompassing 280K SF, including the La Jolla Institute for immunology, which opened in 2006, and the Center for Novel Therapeutics, which has been operational since 2019.

Wexford will develop an additional 14 acres at the research park, providing new life science and tech research lab space, officials, ancillary retail and outdoor gathering spaces.

Three new buildings and two new parking structures are planned for the expansion, built around a pedestrian-focused campus and the two existing buildings at the research park. The new parking structures and their entrances will be located to the periphery for vehicular access from Athena Circle and to minimize pedestrian crossings.

San Diego has maintained its standing as the third-largest US life sciences hub, behind only Boston and the Bay Area, according to JLL’s 2023 Life Sciences report.

However, it remains to be seen whether third quarter results for the San Diego Life Science market will mark any kind of turnaround from the gloomy second quarter 2023 results.

In Q2, the Central San Diego Laboratory market gave back 364K of space, the largest negative figure ever recorded by CBRE. The central market had two straight quarters of negative growth.

Leasing activity in Q2 was a 134K SF, bringing the YTD total to 204K SF-which is nowhere near the 600K SF per quarter average over the last three years, CBRE’s Q2 2023 life sciences market report for San Diego said.

Despite the low level of leasing activity, construction of new lab space reached an all-time high in the second quarter of 5.12M SF, the majority of which is being built in Sorrento County, where a total of 1.6M SF is under construction, and in Downtown (1.8M SF).

Of the 3.35M SF under construction in Central San Diego in Q2, 43% has been pre-leased. Preleasing in Downtown was not as strong.

At the end of Q2, total sublease space stood at 900K SF, the large majority of it residing in core markets. Sublease space in the San Diego life science market accounts for the lion’s share of overall availability.