Gladstone Poised to Buy Mission Bay Life Sciences Offices

Gladstone Institutes is poised to buy 103,400 square feet of life sciences research offices near its hub in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, with plans for additional expansion.

The nonprofit biotech research group is looking to purchase “a condominium interest” in the building at 1450 Owens Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing a regulatory filing. Terms of a potential transaction were not disclosed.

If the deal gets done, Gladstone would take up nearly half of the seven-story, 215,000-square-foot life sciences building completed a year ago by Pasadena-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

The sale is expected to close this year, according to the Security and Exchange Commission filing. It would leave Alexandria with a 25 percent stake in the building, according to the filing. It’s not clear who owns the other 25 percent.

Gladstone President Deepak Srivastava wouldn’t confirm the potential deal. Joel Marcus, the executive chairman and founder of Alexandria, didn’t return emails from the Business Times.

The biotech company, which plans to add 300 scientists for new therapies, is in the middle of a $350 million fundraising campaign to pay for research labs to accommodate them.

Gladstone has filed plans to build a 100,000-square-foot building behind its headquarters at 1650 Owens Street. The expansion is now expected to cost $220 million.

About two-thirds of Gladstone’s $125 million annual budget comes from federal government sources, which are at risk in President Trump’s plans to freeze funding, according to the newspaper.

In 2004, the institutes became Mission Bay’s first biotech tenant beyond the early buildout of the UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. Alexandria’s wedge-shaped building on the northwest edge of the campus was the last commercially developable parcel in Mission Bay, once a collection of railyards and warehouses.

The roughly 100-acre district in the past 25 years has become a neighborhood headlined by UCSF’s campus and research facilities, its cancer, children’s and women’s hospitals and the Golden State Warriors Chase Center arena.

Mission Bay has drawn interest from emerging artificial intelligence companies, according to the Business Times.

Last year, OpenAI booked the entire 315,000-square-foot building next door to Chase Center on Terry A. Francois Boulevard, giving landlords like Alexandria an opportunity to fill offices once earmarked for biotech.

— Dana Bartholomew