North American Life Science Sector Plans 264 New Facilities with Potential $22 Billion Capital Investment

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Reported by Annette Kreuger, Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--During the 1800's gold rush, prospectors would point afar and proclaim "There's gold in them there hills." Today, while not searching for gold, virtually every location in North America sees gold in the construction mounds created by the launch of a new life science facility.

Click on the image at the right for a graph detailing life science projects in development by region.

Despite a prevailing economic pessimism, life science planners are proving to be a rather optimistic bunch. In North America alone, there are currently 264 projects representing a total investment value (TIV) of $21.6 billion in active development. Drawn from reported projects with a future kick-off date from Industrial Info's Pharmaceutical Tracker - Online Database, all are in various stages of planning, ranging from early market analysis to detailed engineering. Some of the projects are grassroot, literally from the ground up. Others, the "additions," include reconfiguration and/or renovations of newly acquired facilities, or projects that are adding an entirely new building to an existing site.

These new builds translate to a project average TIV of $82 million. These kinds of numbers underscore why life science projects remain at the top of any economic developer's "get" list. The current project total of 264 is higher than the actual number of sites (243), as it includes both the initial new build project as well as future phases already in planning.

The projects range from a $1 million investment to construct a new drug delivery facility, all the way up to billion-dollar mega-projects. A number are sourced out of the public sector, with many benefiting from federal or state dollars. On the other hand, a surprising amount of corporate activity is moving forward, as some of the operational redundancies from previous years have been addressed and companies are now ready to begin building. The majority of the projects remain research-based at this point, but there is a pleasing uptick in manufacturing plants.

The indisputable king of industry new build investment is the plan by Baxter International Corporation (NYSE:BAX) (Deerfield, Illinois) to invest $1 billion to construct an approximately 1 million-square-foot plasma fractionation facility with purification and fill/finish suites, equipped for the manufacturing of up to 3 million liters of blood plasma-based therapeutics. Initially operating under the code name "Project Marathon" during negotiations, the company brokered a deal to receive $210 million worth of incentives from the state for the project, which is to be built with the 1,600-acre Stanton Springs development in Covington, Georgia.

Another project that has garnered a lot of interest is from Janssen Biotech, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ). The $150 million plan involves building a 300,000-square-foot building in Radnor, Pennsylvania, through BioMed Realty Trust (Berwyn, Pennsylvania). When complete in 2016, the site will house immunology, oncology, and nephrology research, along with office space.

Not all the projects top out in the nine-figure stratosphere; in fact, there are a couple of dozen valued at less than $20 million each that any municipality would be proud to claim, along with the still higher-than-average paying jobs they will bring. A sample of these would include such projects as the $7 million contract manufacturing (CMO) plant that Bedoukian Research (Danbury, Connecticut) is planning to build in Oxford, Connecticut. The company purchased a 32-acre tract of land in March 2012, with plans to construct and equip a 30,000- to 50,000-square-foot flavors, fragrances and phernomes production plant.

Industrial Info will continue to monitor the project activity closely, making appropriate changes to both project status and value. Some undoubtedly will be put on hold and others cancelled. On the other hand, new ones will move in to take their place.

Industrial Info Resources (IIR), with global headquarters in Sugar Land, Texas, and eight offices outside of North America, is the leading provider of global market intelligence specializing in the industrial process, heavy manufacturing and energy markets. Industrial Info's quality-assurance philosophy, the Living Forward Reporting Principle™, provides up-to-the-minute intelligence on what's happening now, while constantly keeping track of future opportunities.