Exclusive: AstraZeneca signs off on a ‘carbon negative’ new biotech building for one of its latest buyouts

Breakthrough Properties is back keeping the dirt flying in biotech — this time breaking new ground in Amsterdam.

The commercial real estate alliance between Tishman Speyer, which built Pfizer’s new world headquarters in Manhattan, and Bellco Capital, the busy investment group Arie Belldegrun set up with his wife Rebecka 20 years ago, is now at work on a new, five-story, 55,000-square-foot building to house the growing team at Neogene, after AstraZeneca bought out the company last fall in a $320 million deal.

This latest creation was already under discussion when AstraZeneca’s Susan Galbraith helped orchestrate the acquisition in its effort to pave the way to its next generation of cancer drugs — this one focused on TCRs. The Big Pharma player signed off on the plan, which includes some ambitious carbon-negative plans. And it’s been a closely-held endeavor, with Dan Belldegrun steering the deal at Breakthrough after his father, Arie Belldegrun, godfathered Neogene as a founding investor. It’s needed new digs for some time, and Amsterdam’s tight lab space made the new building project a necessity.

Neogene’s bespoke new building — which will be ready to occupy in 2025 — says a lot about the company that’s building it, as well as AstraZeneca. Breakthrough likes to work with select biotechs, as well as open doors to startups doing interesting things in drug development.

“We really leverage our extensive network in the biopharma industry to support companies with promising science early,” Dan Belldegrun tells me. “And I think this project with Neogene is one of those great examples.”

AstraZeneca, under longtime CEO Pascal Soriot, also has a rep for cutting-edge architecture, which the company stubbornly fought for when building a new world headquarters in Cambridge, UK, in the face of massive headaches on the timeline and cost of construction — rather like developing a blockbuster drug. And their building project underscores plans to build Neogene as a subsidiary, rather than absorbing it into their big R&D system.

Despite the market freeze of the past two years, Breakthrough has been pushing through a variety of new biotech developments — all around the hyper-innovative scientific circles of major institutions like Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge.

This latest project comes with all the bells and whistles of a building for the 21st century, paying careful attention to the chorus of demands for a net-zero future for Europe.

Under construction on the campus of the Amsterdam University Medical Centers, the new building is designed to put energy back into the grid, rather than tap it. It will operate with geothermal heating and cooling, lots of PV panels to generate electricity, landscaped terraces with a green roof and a festoon of “architectural solar shades” that lend it a sailing flavor.

AstraZeneca is not talking about costs.

So far, Breakthrough’s reach has extended from new facilities in San Diego and Cambridge, MA — where they built the new CRISPR Therapeutics building — to the UK, with more plans being hatched for the US and Europe. Eventually, says Dan Belldegrun, that list of hubs could include Asia.

Amsterdam made a logical extension to the locations list this year, which they could build on with more projects.

“With the EMA relocation to Amsterdam, they have fantastic research institutions and talent, a strong biopharma community already existing, and then also just a wonderful quality-of-life market,” says the Breakthrough CEO. “So it’s a market we wanted to get into.”

Even as commercial real estate undergoes a harrowing stage in a post-Covid world, with a multitude of staffers intent on remaining remote for much or all of every week, many biotechs are still built around labs that can’t be operated remotely. They were among the first operations to open up after the pandemic hit, and now have protocols in place that can keep them open under some dire conditions. And the industry has long been immune to high rents, keeping focused on hubs that offer plenty of convenient networking.

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