Biotech Firm Expands HQ With Blackstone’s BioMed Realty
AI drug company Xaira Therapeutics signed for 73K SF in South San Francisco
By Greg Cornfield December 12, 2024 3:45 pm
reprints
A new biotech and AI-driven drug company is already expanding and moving its headquarters to a campus in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Xaira Therapeutics announced that it signed a deal with BioMed Realty — the life sciences and tech arm of real estate mammoth Blackstone (BX) — to grow its base operations by about 30 percent and move into 73,075 square feet in South San Francisco, Calif.
Xaira said it will use the new space at 700 Gateway Boulevard — a 360,000-square-foot facility named Gateway of Pacific III that’s part of a 2.2 million-square-foot campus development — to advance its machine learning research and therapeutic product development. The firm anticipates continued growth in 2025 as it works to advance AI and transform how diseases are treated.
The company added that the expansion reinforces the Bay Area’s status as one of the nation’s top markets for life sciences and lab real estate. It’s one of the largest biotech clusters in the world, with hundreds of life sciences companies and venture capital firms.
Media representatives for both the landlord and the tenant did not disclose the asking rent or the length of the lease, and did not return requests for comment.
Near the start of this year, BioMed Realty secured $422.2 million in refinancing from J.P. Morgan Chase, Citi Bank and Deutsche Bank for the 510,000-square-foot first phase of the campus.
Separately, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University, launched Xaira in the spring this year with more than $1 billion in committed capital from lead investors Arch Venture Partners and Foresite Capital, as well as Sequoia Capital, Menlo Ventures and several others.
The company’s latest expansion includes new hires and the appointments of Dr. Paulo Fontoura as chief medical officer and Hetu Kamisetty as chief technology officer effective. The milestones extend a landmark year for Xaira, after co-founder David Baker received the Nobel Prize in chemistry alongside Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind in October.
As of the end of the third quarter this year, Blackstone’s BioMed Realty owned 16 million square feet of life sciences real estate, along with another 2.5 million square feet under construction, in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Gregory Cornfield can be reached at gcornfield@commercialobserver.com.
