SmartLabs Bails on West Coast Expansion
Provider of colocation biotech labs giving up two sites in South San Francisco.
SmartLabs, a Boston-based provider of flexible colocation biotech lab space, is changing course on a West Coast expansion.
The company will close two locations in South San Francisco encompassing 225K SF, including a 145K SF site at BioMed Realty’s Gateway of Pacific development that SmartLabs built out but never occupied, according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times.
The company also is vacating 80K SF at 2 Tower Place, part of Phase 3 Real Estate Partners’ Genesis development.
SmartLabs, which has been in an expansion mode during the past two years, was planning to offer 28 bio-production manufacturing suites in clean-room environments at the Gateway of Pacific building located at 750 Gateway Boulevard.
The company, which has five sites in the Boston area and has expanded into Philadelphia, will focus on East Coast sites with superior “long-term growth prospects,” the report said.
SmartLabs said it will continue to offer custom design solutions to customers on the West Coast to enable them to design and build their own flexible lab spaces.
SmartLabs offers flexible turnkey lab programs to companies that support workflows at every stage of biotech development, including enterprise-grade lab environments and operational support, according to its website.
Since 2021, SmartLabs has doubled the footprint of its Laboratory-as-a-Service model, which the company calls Managed Research Centers and brands as a “validated and democratized alternative to traditional approaches to R&D.”
In March 2023, the company announced a new Managed Research Center at a facility in East Cambridge that is part of 100 CambridgeSide, a 2M SF mixed-use development owned by a New England Development partnership.
SmartLabs said in a release that its East Cambridge facility “will enable programs of all sizes to advance from discovery to clinical trials with a single seamless platform under one roof, a task never before accomplished by an industry infrastructure partner.”
“By colocating labs and bioproduction capabilities in a single facility available on a fractionalized access model, SmartLabs has changed the game for drug development,” the company’s release said.
Phase 3 partnered with Bain to developed two Genesis life science campuses in the Bay Area, including a 797K SF complex known as Genesis South San Francisco that was completed in 2019 and Genesis Marina, a 570K SF life science campus announced in 2022 for a waterfront site in Brisbane.