Facilities Of The Future: SmartLabs CEO Amrit Chaudhuri At Bisnow’s Bay Area Life Sciences Conference

With its proximity to elite research institutions and more than 47M SF of lab inventory, the Bay Area life sciences market continues to attract top tenants. 

But like the industry they serve, life sciences facilities must continuously evolve to meet the changing needs of emerging biotech companies and align with groundbreaking therapies. 

How can developers create flexible lab spaces that can adapt to shifting industry needs? What are today’s life sciences companies looking for in a facility? Will market demand in the Bay Area continue to rise? These questions and more will be addressed at Bisnow’s Bay Area Life Sciences Conference on June 27 at the Westin St. Francis Union Square; register here. 

SmartLabs recognizes the critical importance of adaptable and flexible laboratory spaces for the life sciences industry. The company creates enterprise-grade labs that can be customized to meet life sciences companies’ evolving needs, regardless of their size or modality. SmartLabs CEO Amrit Chaudhuri will be speaking at the Bay Area Life Sciences Conference on June 27. Bisnow sat down with him to learn more about where he sees the Bay Area life sciences market heading, what he is looking forward to at the event, and the unique and revolutionary lab solutions SmartLabs is bringing to San Francisco. 

Bisnow: How do you view the current state of the Bay Area life sciences market? 

Chaudhuri: The market has gone through a bit of a slowdown due to a couple of macro challenges it is facing. Overall, interest rates are affecting the ability of developers and equity partners to get leverage on properties and assets. As interest rates rise, they create higher hurdles and lower risk tolerances for some assets and projects. Additionally, small to midsized biotech companies are going through some capitalization challenges. 

I believe this is a readjustment of the marketplace long-term that has to do with valuations, and 10 years from now, the capital being deployed into the market won’t change, but what will change will be the valuation of the companies that are getting access to capital. 

One of the pros on the real estate side is that much of the old infrastructure that has historically supported drug development is not appropriate for the next generation of development. On the manufacturing and research and development side, the industry will see different needs than what the second-generation spaces from 10 years ago can offer because the science has changed. 

That should still drive investment into the new spaces needed to create these new novel drugs. However, instead of 100K SF, companies might pare down to 50K SF. As a result, the quantity and rate of real estate absorption are probably going to change in the next two years and readjust for what was a projected boom, which is now just a slower absorption rate.

Bisnow: What inspired you to speak at Bisnow's Bay Area Life Sciences event? 

Chaudhuri: The events that Bisnow puts on create an open forum for everyone from real estate brokers and developers to end users to have candid, transparent conversations and network with influential leaders in the life sciences space, including those from larger enterprise organizations. The cadence of these kinds of events regionally is a great touchpoint for people who work in the industry. For us, as a company offering disruptive solutions, being able to go out and build better awareness of who we are and what we do is key. 

Bisnow: You will be speaking on a panel titled Facilities of the Future. What do you think those facilities look like, and what are some challenges in bringing them to life? 

Chaudhuri: This is the core of our business, hence the name SmartLabs. Life sciences facilities of the past were laser-focused on creating extremely high-quality, resilient and redundant resourcing for highly specific and well-defined requirements. The industry spent 150 years focused on small molecule chemistry, but in the 1980s when biotech was invented, those companies built an entirely new paradigm of new technologies, processes, infrastructure and resourcing to create a new category of drugs that solve the toughest challenges in human health.

The facilities of the future do not know what the next generation of processes will be, so the question is: How do companies build highly specific, highly variable environments and resources for an unknown that is only getting more unknown and more diverse? That's the actual fundamental problem in the industry in terms of what the facilities of the future will be, and it is the crux of what our company works to solve. 

Bisnow: What developments are you working on in the Bay Area? 

Chaudhuri: We are bringing online a facility at Gateway Boulevard, right in the heart of South San Francisco. It is 145K SF of what we believe are the most cutting-edge research labs for every modality of science at every stage, in every type of infrastructure, resourcing and operating requirement, to build a drug from discovery through Phase 3 approval. When that facility comes online, it's going to be Version 8 of a unique, proprietary technology that we use to build labs we've been developing over the last eight years, which we call the universal lab framework. It’s going to be an incredibly advanced lab.

To hear more from Chaudhuri, register here for Bisnow’s Bay Area Life Sciences Conference on June 27. 

This article was produced in collaboration between Studio B and SmartLabs. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

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