Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]) has confirmed what the biotech community has been buzzing about for a couple months—it is moving its headquarters back to Cambridge, MA. The company is now planning to build two new buildings in Cambridge to house 530 employees who will move from the current headquarters in Weston, MA, according to a report today in the Boston Globe.
CEO George Scangos told the newspaper that the move is being made to put the company’s entire Massachusetts workforce—about 2,000 people—in Kendall Square. Biogen plans to sublease the Weston facility once it has moved employees into the new buildings in Cambridge, Scangos said in the account. One of the new buildings, at 17 Cambridge Center, will have 190,000 square feet; the other, on Binney Street, will have 305,000 square feet, the Globe reported.
“We want to be the very best at what we do,” Scangos told the Globe. “We have a lot on our plate, and execution will be absolutely critical. Being geographically separated, there’s a barrier.”
Speculation has been thriving over such a move since May, when Scangos made remarks in a Reuters interview about how he didn’t like being separated from the company’s R&D operations in Cambridge. In an interview with Xconomy last month, Scangos said the company was working on ways to bring the commercial side and the R&D sides of the company back together in Cambridge.
The decision to move the headquarters to Weston was made by former Biogen CEO James Mullen, before Scangos took over a year ago.
