Alexandria Real Estate Equities Announces Early Renewal With insitro For A 6-Year Lease Extension At The Alexandria Center For Advanced Technologies Mega Campus In South San Francisco
Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE:ARE), the first, preeminent, longest-tenured and pioneering owner, operator and developer of collaborative life science mega campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, today announced that insitro, a leading machine learning-powered drug discovery and development company, has executed an early renewal for a 6-year lease extension through August 31, 2034 for 143,188 RSF at 279 East Grand Avenue on the Alexandria Center® for Advanced Technologies – South San Francisco mega campus in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2018, recognizing the potential of insitro's innovative platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically machine learning (ML), and data at scale to decode complex biology and discover new medicines in therapeutic areas such as metabolism, oncology and neuroscience, Alexandria executed its first lease with insitro for nearly 36,000 RSF of Labspace® infrastructure at 279 East Grand Avenue. The significant early renewal of insitro's headquarters and R&D site underscores the drug discovery and development company's long-term commitment to the Alexandria Center for Advanced Technologies – South San Francisco mega campus. It also highlights the need for laboratory space to generate the large datasets that power AI capabilities in the discovery and development of new medicines and affirms that Alexandria is strongly positioned to enable companies working in the growing area of AI-enhanced laboratory-based research and development.
AI/ML hold immense potential to make the discovery and development of new medicines faster and more efficient, ultimately reducing the time and cost involved in the overall R&D process — including the discovery of new biology, the development of novel therapies and the design of clinical trials. AI's power is derived from the application of computational approaches to high-quality data at scale. The complexity and volume of data needed to train AI models involve highly integrated R&D infrastructure and drive the need for specialized technical laboratory space in Alexandria's core life science markets. With its goal of bringing better medicines faster to the patients who can benefit most through ML and data at scale, insitro is creating computational models of disease from massive laboratory-generated datasets and aggregated human cohort data to discover new biomarkers and genetic drivers of disease that anchor an advancing pipeline of therapeutics in liver disease, cancer and ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
Alexandria entered South San Francisco, the birthplace of biotechnology, in 1998, and today the submarket is home to the densest concentration of life science companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the past 25 years, Alexandria has strategically assembled a well-located footprint in South San Francisco, consisting of nearly 3.4 million RSF in operation as of December 31, 2023. The Alexandria Center for Advanced Technologies – South San Francisco mega campus, which aggregates 1.0 million RSF of operating properties and future development opportunities as of December 31, 2023, is at the heart of the submarket and is positioned to foster the growth of disruptive companies, like insitro. As part of Alexandria's purposeful efforts to enable its tenants to recruit and retain the brightest talent to advance their mission-critical science, the company is envisioning an elevated and activated ecosystem through the seamless integration of collaborative amenities into this mega campus, including a high-tech conference center, an inviting café and lounge, experiential walking paths promoting health and wellness, and enhanced connectivity to adjacent transportation hubs.