Real Estate In The BioBelt
BIOTECH EXPANSION
By Linda F. Jarrett
The St. Louis BioBelt boasts more than its share of biotechnology and healthcare companies, and three of these facilities are spreading their already expansive wings even more.
Covidien, bioMeriéux, and Pfizer all are in the midst of enlarging their companies to meet the growing need for more sophisticated and efficient pharmaceuticals.
This amounts to approximately $361 million in growth in this industry which only serves to help advance St. Louis’ reputation as a major player
in the biotechnology/plant life sciences/health care field.
COVIDIEN
As a leading global provider of health care products, and the sixth largest generic pharmaceutical manufacturer in the United States, Covidien is expanding its research and development facility in Webster Groves and its imaging solutions manufacturing plant in Maryland Heights.
Tim Wright, president of Pharma-ceutical Products and Imaging Solutions, a Covidien division based in St. Louis, says that Covidien has a $1 billion-plus pharmaceutical business. “Our area of focus is in the area of controlled substances, which include many of the common pain medications. We have a small research and development facility in Webster Groves, and that has been a good place for us, and we decided to expand it given that we had an existing population of employees there.”
The $30 million expansion at Webster Groves includes a 9,000-square-foot pilot plant that will enable the facility to speed up production of its pharmaceutical products.
“This allows us to attract the scientific talent that we need to advance our development program,” Wright says. “It creates a pool of people that are scientists, and those types of highly-skilled people are absolutely imperative to this type of facility.”
General contractor, architectural and engineering design services were all provided by Clark, Richardson & Biskup. Construction started in October 2007 and was completed last year.
Covidien will invest approximately
$72 million in the Maryland Heights facility by adding over 12,000 square feet, including over 5,000 square feet for a new radiopharmaceutical production line.
“We felt that it was the right time to expand given the growth we have seen in the use of nuclear medicine as a
primary diagnostic tool,” Wright says.
In Maryland Heights, we have approximately 400 people and at Webster Groves, 100 people,” Wright says. “But we will be adding to that base with more highly-trained individuals that have particular expertise in those areas.”
Construction started early this year and is scheduled for completion in 2011. The general contractor is McGrath & Associates Inc. with architectural and engineering design by CH2M HILL Lockwood Greene.
Both developments were granted personal tax abatements for fourteen and a half years for $5.3 million with an additional $658,123 in abated sales tax.
“The local and state governments have been very cooperative with us,” Wright says. “These facilities allow us to attract scientific talent that we need to advance our development program.
Besides Maryland Heights and Webster Groves, Covidien has four other facilities in the St. Louis area, Hazelwood, Earth City, Overland, and a plant on North Second Street, and employs about 2,500 people locally. They also have a facility in Kansas City. Their main office is in Bermuda.
Covidien has been in the St. Louis area since 1898, Wright says. “Our predecessor company was Mallinckrodt, which was founded in 1867. Tyco International purchased Mallinckrodt in 2000.”
In 2007, Tyco separated into three companies, Tyco International, Tyco Electronics and Covidien.
bioMérieux
To bring an end to bioMérieux scientists walking a half-mile hike to their laboratory, the company is building a
$9 million, 40,000-square-foot facility on their 25-acre campus in Hazelwood.
BioMérieux, based in Marcy l’Etoile, France, manufacturers systems used by hospitals and clinical laboratories as well as industrial and pharmaceutical companies to detect and identify infectious diseases and bacteria in food, drugs and cosmetics.
Scott Remes, site director, says the company had grown over the past five to 10 years to the point where they had to lease a building a half-mile away. “This construction is primarily to bring all these people back. We have five buildings, but one is empty. It’s a former Rhodes Furniture warehouse next to the Hazelwood campus, and we’ll use it for future expansion.”
BioMérieux employs 600 people in their St. Louis site, 120 of which are in research and development.
The St. Louis site, he says, focuses on systems that help with microbial infectious diseases.
“We make the systems and the reagents that go along with them and ship them world wide,” he says. “Everything we do either detects the presence of bacteria, identifies bacteria or provides information about the susceptibility of the bacteria to various drugs that are available.”
Tests run on patients are “very likely” run by a bioMérieux system, Remes says.
“Sometimes you’ll hear of these drug-resistant staph infections,” he says. “If you have an infection that’s resistant to various antibiotics, they’re constantly running tests to see which antibiotics work. We promote the sensible use of antibiotics and our system helps physicians use just the right antibiotic so they don’t use one that is too strong, which will just increase resistance in people.”
In keeping with the movement toward “green” building, bioMérieux is going for gold LEED certification. Tinted windows will allow natural light, but keep the heat out to reduce cooling costs. Much of the materials used will be from within a 500-mile radius, lessening transportation costs. Showers will be provided for those who ride their bikes to work.
Alberici, the general contractor for the project, broke ground in October, and Remes says the $9 million structure should be ready for occupation by October 31.
Remes says St. Louis has provided
a stable business environment for
bioMérieux. “We’re able to find the people we need, for the professional side as well as for production.”
The Hazelwood site, Remes says, was a spinoff from the space program. McDonnell Douglas was working in this space technology and eventually created Vitek, a research project that was part of the NASA space program. BioMérieux bought Vitek in 1988.
“This technology was originally intended for use in space for two different reasons. One, it was for astronauts to diagnose themselves, specifically for urinary tract infections, and secondly, it was also intended to be used to study the growth of bacteria in space,” Remes says.
Pfizer
Pfizer is also bringing its people home. With offices in Chesterfield, Creve Coeur, Town & Country and the Central West End, the company last month consolidated 250 researchers in a $200 million, 330,000-square-foot building on its Chesterfield campus.
“This will improve our ability to do the work more effectively,” says Ed Bryant, senior advisor for public affairs. “We won’t be adding new jobs, but we are almost doubling our lab space with over 200,000 square feet, so that’s a big jump from where we were.”
Site Director Don Frail emphasized the “ability to interact and share information” as crucial to moving ahead and developing new ideas among researchers.
“It’s just not very efficient to have 200 researchers located 22 miles away,” Bryant says. “So we’re bringing them here, and they won’t just be squeezed in. This will be brand new lab space and will be primarily a biology building.”
Ed Crader, Pfizer architect, says the building would house four research groups: Drug Safety Research and Development; Pharmacokinetics Dynamics and Metabolism; Indications Discovery Unit; and Comparative Medicine.
“We have a 96-lab capacity,” he says. “We wanted to do more expansive research and combine everyone on one site, our main campus. Science is a team sport and this is the fruition of a dream.”
The lab space is configured so that researchers can “actually move things around,” Bryant says.
Pfizer’s research is focused in two major areas—Inflammation, rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, and biologics. Out of this research have come Celebrex® and Dynastat®, two drugs for inflammation, and Genotropin® and Somavert®, which are human growth hormones.
They have also started construction on a $50 million, 60,000-square-foot expansion of its biologics pilot plant building. Biologics, Bryant says, are biological entity medicines, developed from protein or cell line cultures.
In this building, 30 researchers will study emerging biotech products that show promise in treating a range of health conditions including cancers, heart disease and eye ailments. Completion is slated for later this year.
General Contractor and Construction Manager for the project is Gilbane Inc., Providence R.I., and Tarlton Corp. of
St. Louis.
