Drug Developer GSK Leaving Life Sciences Lab Near DC

A major pharmaceutical company is leaving behind more than half a million square feet in a suburb of Washington, D.C. when its lease expires next year.

London-based GSK is set to depart 635,000 square feet at 14200 Shady Grove Road in Rockville, Maryland, Bisnow reported. The drug developer is the lone tenant of the GI Partners property and its lease is set to expire next summer.

GSK’s impending departure was first reported by the Washington Business Journal. The company does not plan to relocate until March 2026, a few months before its lease will expire. It will keep another property in Rockville, a 420,000-square-foot manufacturing facility.

The company is relocating from the lab space to Cambridge, Massachusetts; it will ultimately occupy six floors at a property on Cambridge Park Drive.

GI Partners, which did not respond to Bisnow’s request for comment, could be in a financial pickle on Shady Grove Road if it doesn’t find a replacement for GSK.

GI Partners acquired the Rockville life sciences property from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System in 2017 for $337.5 million. It took out a $138 million loan from Goldman Sachs, later packaged into two CMBS loans, which are due to mature in January 2027, according to Morningstar Credit.

The property, which was built in 2003 and renovated in 2016, houses GSK’s vaccines research and development and infectious disease teams. GI Partners tapped Scheer Partners to market the property, which was initially built to serve Human Genomes Sciences.

While the Boston-Cambridge area is a top life sciences market in the nation, the Washington, D.C. metro has its own advantages in the sector, including proximity to the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, as well as well as talent incubators like the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University.

Venture capital investment in D.C.-area life sciences companies, however, dropped to about $914 million, according to Savills, representing a five-year low.

— Holden Walter-Warner