Eli Lilly has opened a $700 million R&D center in the Boston Seaport, boosting its RNA and DNA research capabilities and expanding its biotech-hosting Gateway Labs to the East Coast for the first time.
Lilly disclosed plans to invest $700 million to set up a site in the Boston Seaport in April 2022. Speaking to investors at the time, Lilly CEO Dave Ricks framed the investment as a part of a push to develop novel RNA- and DNA-based medicines and “push the boundaries of delivery technology to unlock difficult to treat targets in key strategic areas for us like neurodegeneration, diabetes and obesity.”
The facility, dubbed the Lilly Seaport Innovation Center (LSC), is now open. The center occupies 346,000 square feet in a 12-story Alexandria Real Estate Equities building on the waterfront. Lilly will house around 500 of its scientists and researchers at the LSC.
The employees will rub shoulders with 200 people from other companies through Lilly Gateway Labs, the Big Pharma’s biotech-hosting program. Lilly opened the first Gateway lab in San Francisco in 2019. That site has hosted more than 20 biotechs, providing the blueprint for a model that Lilly has expanded to San Diego and Boston. Ricks, speaking at an investor event in January, said to “look for more in the future.”
“The general idea here is to take, not start-ups, but more of the scale-up space and add the suite of services, along with space and capital, that Big Pharma can offer and allow the entrepreneur in the biotech to drive their idea to success or conclusion,” Ricks said.
Hosting biotechs gives Lilly a chance to connect with companies and learn about their technology. For Ricks, that means “a lot more touch points in the ecosystem for future perhaps M&A, perhaps licensing or maybe just a collaboration in another sense.”
Lilly discussed the financial impact of the Boston Seaport site in its annual report for 2023. Specifically, the company cited (PDF) the center as the driver of a step up in right-of-use assets obtained in exchange for new operating lease liabilities, which rose from $155.4 million to $590 million.