Is Big Pharma’s Patent Cliff A Launchpad Or Fall-Off For Lab Real Estate? Life sciences real estate has clung to signs of resurgence in recent quarters, including a small uptick in venture capital funding and the thus far unanswered hope for interest rate reductions. But there’s still faith in one potential savior: Big Pharma’s patent cliff, expected to create a surge of investment in mergers and acquisitions. The patent cliff, when blockbuster drugs lose patent protection and generic alternatives take market share, will eat into profits for all large global pharmaceutical firms. Yet it will also give them plenty of reasons to invest in mergers and acquisitions to pick up promising new treatments to fill their pipelines. And this rush of investment could turn into “a perfect storm” for M&A, according to JLL. The longstanding question, especially for developers bringing lab space online during a supply glut, is how much a wave of M&A activity will impact the lab real estate market and how long it will take to start eating away at the roughly 14.8% national lab vacancy rate. 
M&A activity in biotech is 40% higher than the historical average, according to the Pharma M&A Index compiled by GlobalData, the highest it has been since the index was started in 2016. With the supply of lab research and development space in major markets Read the full story here. | 
