Waste Management And Decent Lifts: The Grubby Business Of What Life Sciences Tenants Really Want

Clusters are great, location is wonderful, but neither will definitely net you the tenant you want if your building can’t get the reality of life sciences right. It isn’t always glamorous, but it is super important. 

“Waste management became quite a big factor actually in our search for a new location,” hVIVO Vice President of Clinical Operations Adam French told the audience at Bisnow’s UK Life Sciences Summer Cocktail and Schmooze, held at the Mainframe Building in Euston.

The viral challenge studies company was looking at several office buildings that had been converted to lab space but found that few of them had dedicated areas where it could hold and process waste. 

“By the time I looked around the third building, it went from a secondary factor to the first thing I looked at, because if they don’t have it, there’s no point looking around the rest of the building. We produce so much waste, how can it be removed? Also not just waste, but services such as gasses, liquid nitrogen and moving samples in and out.”

Lifts large enough to move equipment in and out, a similarly large and efficient goods area, and good road access and parking are likewise vital, French added. Being close to a train station is brilliant for staff, but equipment and samples aren’t being delivered and taken away by train.

In the end, hVIVO took space at 40 Bank Street, an office owned by Canary Wharf Group where some floors have been converted, and French said that the large underground space available at the building helped it fulfil those quotidian needs of deliveries and disposals. The building’s guaranteed backup power system also appealed — if power goes down in a life sciences building, years of work can be lost. 

But even with those elements in place, it isn’t always plain sailing, and real estate companies need to learn that life sciences occupiers work to a different rhythm compared to many companies. 

“It's very different than managing just offices. It’s not 9-to-5 — people don't ever go home,” French said. “We have volunteers [in clinical trials] on-site 24/7, our business needs to run 24/7, so simple things like fire alarm tests that were previously done in the evening because no one's there are now waking up our volunteers.”

The message for owners and developers from panellists at the event was to understand the kind of science your tenants might be undertaking. If you are building speculatively, you might not know exactly who they are, but it is good to have in mind the size of the company or the stage it might be at in its funding life cycle. 

“For each company, the type of science they're doing and the kind of scale they're at, what funding they have and therefore the cost they can pay, is always going to be a driver [of the] workspace they need,” Imperial College Investment Manager Katherine Fieldgate said. 

With the life sciences real estate sector in the UK in its infancy compared to the U.S., there is much debate in the sector about building outfitted lab space for tenants versus providing space at a shell and core level that tenants can fit out themselves. 

“More and more we’re doing more fitted lab space to a relatively generic specification because that's where the most demand has been,” Fieldgate said, referring to Imperial’s White City campus, which provides academic and commercial space.  

“We're pretty pleased with that specification. It has proved workable for most tenants coming in, as they haven’t had to do lots and lots of work to reconfigure the space, which obviously is time-consuming and costs a lot of money.”

But that fitted lab space can reduce flexibility for a tenant.

“So quite often, fitted space seems like an easy option,” London BioScience Innovation Centre Director Amanda Keightley-Pugh said. “[But tenants] come in and they want adaptability in that space, but adaptability, when you start looking at moving partitions, adjusting [mechanical and electrical infrastructure], your air supplies, your workflows, doesn't always work with fitted space.”

French had some advice for owners of offices that are hoping to convert them to more profitable labs. 

“Lots of buildings that are trying to bring life sciences into them, the slab-to-slab height is too small,” he said. “You can't get a meter of space above the ceiling and then have 3 meters minimum to get my safety cabinets into my equipment. So there's a number of things that need to be considered before you even go down the road.”