A joint venture between a New York developer and a Los Angeles biotech venture-capital firm last week paid Gillette $80 million for a 2.4-acre parcel at A and Binford streets that Gillette now uses mainly for parking. Read more.
Rendering by RODE Architects.
The Broadway Company of the Back bay has proposed replacing the old blue buildings at 202 West 1st St. at C Street with a "vibrant commercial office, life sciences, research and development project that better serves the needs of the community and its expanding workforce at this industrial section of South Boston’s First Street corridor." Read more.
A developer wants to replace a two-story warehouse at 155 North Beacon St. in Brighton, now home to the Sound Museum rehersal studios across from the Tin Tin Buffet, with a four-building complex of research labs and office space. Read more.
The Zoning Board of Appeal today unanimously rejected a proposal to convert an unoccupied office building at 69-71 A St. into a "boutique" life-sciences building, because it sits in an area now zoned specifically for residential use - like the condo building next door on West 3rd Street. Read more.
Oxford Properties, which owns the building across Atlantic Avenue from South Station where WeWork no longer works, says it will soon file plans to replace the co-working space with space aimed at attracting some of those up-and-coming life-science companies that seem to be what's keeping Boston's commercial developers afloat these days - and maybe add a ground-floor restaurant to keep those workers and nearby Leather District residents well fed. Read more.
A new report from the BPDA says that what is already the nation's largest biotech region keeps adding jobs, which is why the industry has exploded out of Kendall Square across the river and down the Charles. Read more.
Rendering by DHK Architects.
Cronin Development has filed plans with the BPDA for an eight-story building on Drydock Avenue at Tide Street in the Raymond Flynn Marine Park that would feature the seemingly now obligatory life-sciences R&D space as well as space for an actual marine-industrial concern - Boston Ship Repair, which runs the large drydock that gave Drydock Avenue its name. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that a biotech company that genetically modifies bacteria and animal cells to produce new drugs is engaged in manufacturing, which means it has to pay more state taxes. Read more.
Xconomy reports the stock price for Cambridge-based Seres Therapeutics is dropping like a rock on news that its novel attempt to treat an increasingly antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria didn't seem to work much better than a placebo. Read more.
N. Anthony Coles, who recently returned to head up a biotech startup (based on work at MIT, natch), writes about the area's emergence as the world's leading innovation center in the field:
It has become an almost utopian community, where intellect knows no bounds, and science always trumps difficult disease treatment problems, cracking code after code to derive new state-of-the-art therapies with space-age technologies.
Xconomy reports that Spero Therapeutics today announces a $30-million round of investments for its search to find new drugs to fight bacteria that have gained resistance to current antibiotics.
AsymmetRx Medical, an Acton company that holds a patent on an antibody used to diagnose prostate cancer, is suing Santa Cruz Biotechnology of Dallas on charges the Texas company offers a product that uses the same basic idea.
In its lawsuit, filed this week in US District Court in Boston, AsymmetRx, founded on the work of a Harvard researcher, says Santa Cruz started selling its product after it had agreed in 2007 not to do so - to settle a similar lawsuit AsymmetRx filed over the same exact patent.
Luke Timmerman explains why Boston is poised to overtake the Bay Area as the biotech hub of the universe - and his reasons sound a lot like the reasons why the Bay Area overtook the Boston area as the high-tech center of the world:
Mark Levy analyzes a Globe story that purports to find a growing "backlash" against tech development in the city, based largely on the fact that the Forest City project got defeated:
The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is looking to consolidate its two Cambridge locations into a single, more centrally-located facility. FierceBiotech reports. The company said in a release that it plans to "enhance its presence" in Cambridge, and to shift "selected resources" up from Groton. That, presumably, translates to more high-caliber biotech jobs for the Boston area.
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