The New York City Council has approved the Science Park and Research Campus (SPARC) Kips Bay and Innovation East projects. The vote completed the public review process for the two projects in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, which the New York City Economic Development Corporation called key initiatives in advancing the goal of creating 10 million square feet of life sciences space locally.

“The state-of-the-art projects at SPARC Kips Bay and Innovation East will not only drive significant economic impact but also create a strong talent pipeline through the city’s academic institutions and organizations,” said NYCEDC president & CEO Andrew Kimball.

NYCEDC said SPARC Kips Bay will transform an entire city block with more than two million square feet of academic, public health and life sciences space. The Innovation East development, located at 455 First Ave., will replace the former and obsolete Public Health Lab with a new state-of-the-art life science hub.

Texas Woman’s University topped off its future health sciences facility, placing the highest beam in place signifying its peak height.  

In September 2023, Texas Woman’s broke ground on a $107 million, 136,000 square-foot health sciences center in Denton to serve as an inter-professional education facility linking students in the allied health fields with an emphasis on preparing them to serve in rural settings. The building will expand health-related programming, community outreach, research and other activities at Texas Woman’s.

The building will include labs, classrooms, collaborative workspaces, outdoor clinic sites, a teaching kitchen, community health care clinics and student training spaces.

The building project is scheduled for completion in the summer of 2025, with an opening set for the fall of 2025. The school’s role in health-related professional education will go a long way toward filling gaps in the state’s health-related positions. The Texas Department of State Health Services estimated that the state will face a shortage of most types of nurses by 2032, including a registered nurse shortage of more than 57,000, based on the needs of the growing population.

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GXP-Storage is developing an $80 million, 30-acre campus in Middlesex Corporate Centre that it plans to use as its international headquarters. The buildings are just east of Raleigh, off US Hwy. 64. The company says it will be hiring up to 100 employees.

GXP stores samples, containers and pallets of material in various temperatures from controlled ambient to ultra-low and cryogenic settings for life sciences companies. The materials are regulated for research and manufacturing, as well as healthcare-related biomedical and biodefense materials.

The Triangle Business Journal reports Nash County owned the land, and the county commissioners voted late last year to sell the land and an existing shell building to GXP for about $4.6 million.

GXP-Storage aims to have the first facility — in the shell building — operational by May.

The first building at the GXP-Storage campus will be a roughly 63,000-square-foot building with more than 200,000 cubic feet of storage capacity. The company says there is room for over 1 million square feet of floor space.

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Two big players in life sciences investing and development, Charlotte-based Trinity Capital Advisors and California-based Foundation Capital Ventures, are seeking to expand nationally and work together on projects.

Courtesy of Hanbury Architecture

A rendering of Spark LS, a $1B life sciences campus planned for the Research Triangle.

The partnership, known as Foundation, will be led by Trinity Managing Partners Denis Sullivan, Scott Altick, Walker Collier and Jeff Sheehan. Significant focus will be placed on recapitalizing existing assets, Sullivan said. Trinity was a significant buyer of defaulted loans during the Global Financial Crisis.

The two firms first collaborated on Park Point LP in Durham, North Carolina, and Spark LS, a $1B, 109-acre mixed-use life sciences campus in the Research Triangle Park region. Trinity had seen success in the RTP market, Sheehan said, and began looking for a partner to make a move to go national. 

Trinity boasts a 3M SF portfolio in the Research Triangle, including the 911K SF Southport Innovation Center in Morrisville, North Carolina, and the 265K SF Venable Center in downtown Durham.

Sheehan said he sees opportunity in utilizing the firms’ combined relationships with tenants. It would be an obvious move to help those doing research and development in the three biggest life sciences markets find space to commercialize and expand in North Carolina, taking advantage of the region’s biomanufacturing strength. 

“We’re also really excited about the amount of early stage research that is coming to North Carolina, acknowledging the skilled workforce that’s available,” said Sullivan, a former BioMed Realty chief investment officer.

But while there are opportunities in this environment, it is important to be selective.

“We think that going forward, you’re really going to have to be a stock picker, in terms of which projects you select,” Sullivan said. “And we really see a value in having a proven track record as an operator from both a tenant and a lender perspective.”

Real estate services giant Savills is acquiring T3 Advisors, a specialist in life sciences tenant representation, in an effort to expand Savills’ expertise in that fast-growing sector. 

Founded in 2001 with offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Palo Alto, California, T3 will rebrand as T3 Advisors, A Savills Company. T3 founder and CEO Roy Hirshland will become a vice chairman at Savills and continue to lead T3 Advisors. The buyer didn’t disclose a price.

“The acquisition of T3 will further amplify the life science and technology industry advisory services that Savills can provide to clients on a global basis,” Savills Group CEO Mark Ridley said in a statement. “These are key growth sectors for us and are integral to our continued strategic expansion across North America.”

Though already in a growth mode, life sciences got a boost from the coronavirus pandemic, and the demand for space in life sciences hubs is still expanding, pushed by investment in the sector from private venture capital as well as federal sources like the National Institutes of Health.

Development in the sector is also brisk nationwide. San Diego State University is developing the 80-acre Mission Valley complex, which will include life sciences facilities. In Houston, the 37-acre TMC3 project will seek to gestate ideas from the Texas Medical Center into full-fledged companies. In Pittsburgh, a 1915-vintage Ford Motor plant is being reborn as The Assembly, a $330M biomedical research hub anchored by the University of Pittsburgh. 

Boston, San Francisco and San Diego remain the top U.S. clusters for life sciences, according to JLL, but other markets are emerging quickly, such as Charlotte, Seattle, Denver and Austin.

In New York, which is also a rising life sciences hub, CBRE reports that life sciences leasing has totaled 257.4K SF so far this year, up from 155.9K SF in all of 2020 and 72.4K SF in 2019.