Shire Unveils Plan for SD Campus, Regenerative Medicine Expansion

Shire (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SHPGY]]), the Irish drug giant that acquired San Diego’s Advanced BioHealing a year ago, says today it has been working with San Diego-based BioMed Realty Trust to develop a corporate campus in San Diego as part of a substantial expansion of its regenerative medicine business. The move is expected to generate “several hundred new jobs.”

In a separate statement, BioMed Realty says it has acquired two adjacent land parcels totaling 28 acres to develop a new campus for Advanced BioHealing that will include office, laboratory, warehouse, and manufacturing facilities. The Sorrento Mesa property, which BioMed Realty acquired for $47 million, lies between Alere, Inc. and the Scripps Proton Therapy Center and can accommodate facilities totaling 800,000 square feet.

Construction of the first phase, a 150,000-square-foot facility to house manufacturing and associated operations, is slated to begin next year. In its statement, Shire says, “the expansion “could create several hundred local jobs once the regenerative medicine campus is operational.” Shire, based in Dublin, Ireland, also has major offices in Cambridge, MA, and Wayne, PA, and operates manufacturing facilities in Lexington, MA, and Owings Mills, MD.

Advanced BioHealing also plans to maintain its existing manufacturing facility on North Torrey Pines Road where the development of Dermagraft, a bio-engineered human skin substitute, was pioneered.

“This new campus will give us the flexibility and increased capacity we need to develop and manufacture new regenerative medicine therapies and build our foundation for continued growth in this exciting field,” says Kevin Rakin, Shire’s Regenerative Medicine President, in a statement today.

Shire says it plans to add manufacturing capacity for Dermagraft, which is used to treat diabetic ulcers. The company says it also plans to manufacture new regenerative medicine products.

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.