Venter Institute Raises $53M Through Sale-Leaseback Deal

me to e-mail Venter Institute spokeswoman Heather Kowalski (who is married to Venter) and ask if the sale poses any implications for the Venter Institute in San Diego. I also asked if it had any bearing on the institute’s plans to build a new 45,000-gross square foot research facility on the UCSD campus above the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). Plans for the proposed LEED-certified (i.e. green and sustainable) research facility say it is intended to foster collaboration between the Venter Institute and SIO, the California Institute of Information Technology and Telecommunications, (Calit2), UCSD Health Sciences, and the UCSD campus in general.

Kowalski answered: “We believe that this has positive implications for both JCVI’s East and West Coast operations. To your question regarding the West Coast, we hope that this financially beneficial deal will enable us to continue to move forward with our plans to construct the carbon neutral lab facility on the UCSD campus as soon as possible.”

How much funding might be available for the UCSD project is unknown. Kowalski did not respond when I asked how much the lab is expected to cost. It also seems likely that some proceeds will be used to put the Venter Institute’s Maryland facility on sounder financial footing. In its account of the sale-leaseback deal, The Washington Business Journal notes that the most-recent financial records available for the nonprofit Venter Institute show that a $2.2 million budget excess in 2006 caved into a deficit of nearly $17.2 million in 2008.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.