Pfizer Boosts NYC’s Biotech Efforts

NEW YORK CITY-Giving a boost to the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to establish a biotech sector here, locally based Pfizer is bringing a concept it originated on the West Coast to its home city. The pharmaceutical giant is launching a New York City outpost of its Centers for Therapeutic Innovation, a network of partnership intended to accelerate the translation of biomedical research into finished pharmaceutical products. It has partnered with seven of the city’s leading hospitals and is leasing space at the Alexandria Center for Life Science, which opened in December and to date is the only life science park here.

A Pfizer spokeswoman declines to discuss the terms of the lease, although she tells GlobeSt.com the Alexandria Center space will accommodate about 50 employees. Members of Cushman & Wakefield’s leasing team at the 3.7-acre property, which will encompass 1.1 million square feet of lab and office space when fully built out, were unavailable for comment by deadline. A source familiar with the deal says the lease is for approximately 15,000 square feet; the Alexandria Center’s 310,000-square-foot first phase was already about 90% leased before Tuesday’s announcement.

Pfizer’s partners in the local Center for Therapeutic Innovation include Rockefeller University, New York University Langone Medical Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Mount Sinai Medical Center, Columbia University Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Weill Cornell Medical College. The first such center was launched in at the University of California, San Francisco this past November.

Pfizer says the centers’ format mimic a venture capital-funded biotechnology start-up. The pharmaceutical company funds pre-clinical and clinical development programs, offering equitable intellectual property and ownership rights to support continued experimentation and exploration, as well as broad rights to publication. Successful programs that advance to commercialization by Pfizer will be subject to license terms that will include milestone payments and royalties.

City and state officials welcomed the announcement. In a release, Seth Pinsky, president of the New York City Economic Development Corp., calls it “another vote of confidence in New York City’s growing bioscience sector, an industry that is key part of our emerging innovation economy. As a home to world-leading centers of medical research and a leading recipient of grant funding, New York City is an ideal place for this important collaboration.”

When the Alexandria Center’s first phase opened this past December, Joel Marcus, chairman/CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, told GlobeSt.com that New York City had nearly everything necessary to support a life sciences cluster except commercial lab space. “New York had never really had a commercial life science presence,” said Marcus, whose Pasadena, CA-based life sciences REIT has developed in virtually all the major biotech markets in the US. “They have academic and clinical, but no commercial side.”

Life science isn’t the only high-tech sector the Bloomberg administration intends to encourage. Last month, the EDC issued a Request for Expressions of Interest from major universities and similar organizations to partner on an applied sciences research facility, which like the Pfizer partnership would be geared toward opportunities for commercialization.