News Coverage

Hopkins puts $14M into space at east-side biopark

July 27, 2007

by Sue Schultz, Baltimore Business Journal

With its first and largest tenant forking over $14 million to construct new research space, the Science + Technology Park at Johns Hopkins is beginning to take shape and garner interest from other biotechnology companies and some retailers.

The Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, based out of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, will occupy two floors of the first building. The center's 100,000-square-foot location at the corner of Ashland Avenue and North Wolfe Street, will include office space, labs, research equipment and a minimally invasive surgical training center.

With construction under way near Johns Hopkins Hospital, Scott Levitan, senior vice president and development director with Forest City Science + Technology, the company developing the park, said the developers have secured commitments from tenants for almost the entire building.

Levitan said both companies and retailers are interested in the space, but he declined to comment on specific names of prospective tenants.

"We are at a place where we can market it well," Levitan said. "It's a real thing, not just promises anymore."

The institute, founded in 2000 and comprising the eight science departments in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, received a $10 million gift last year toward research in the new space. Hensel Phelps Construction Co. will build the new research center.

The first building of the new biopark, located at 855 N. Wolfe St., will have a total of 277,000 square feet for lease. It is slated to open by spring 2008.

"It's been a real challenge to lease space in this building," said Jack Shannon, CEO of the East Baltimore Development Inc., a nonprofit organization working on the revitalization project including the new biopark. "We are creating a market that didn't exist before."

With serious prospects gaining interest, Shannon said he would like to see the first building mostly filled when it opens. He said Baltimore's future as a growing biotech hub depends largely on the success of the first few buildings being developed on both the city's east side and on the west side at the UMB BioPark.

The new biopark near Hopkins is targeting small-scale biotech manufacturing companies, pharmaceutical firms, research labs, and professional services like law and accounting firms that work with the biotechnology industry.