Baltimore, MD – Scheer Partners, the leading provider of fully integrated commercial real estate services for the health science industry in the Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas, announced today that it has negotiated the sale of a 56,000-square-foot bio-manufacturing plant across the street from the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center campus in Baltimore.
The purchaser is Rockville, Md.-based Emergent BioSolutions, a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development, manufacture and commercialization of vaccines and therapeutics – and whose marketed product, BioThrax®, is the only vaccine licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the prevention of anthrax infection.
Emergent bought the two-story facility at 5901 E. Lombard St. for $7.85 million from the MdBio Foundation Inc. A team of Scheer executives including Mike Norris, LEED AP, vice president; Adam Nachlas and Henry Bernstein, both senior vice presidents; and company President Robert Scheer successfully marketed the facility and received interest from numerous local, national and international firms, including start-ups and well established businesses.
“Large-scale biopharmaceutical manufacturers are not abundant in our region, so we are quite pleased with this transaction,” Norris says. “Emergent is an expanding, publicly traded company with the financial strength to buy and operate such a facility.”
The team at Scheer Partners has a long track record of assisting biotech and other health care companies with their real estate needs, and that know-how proved pivotal for their client. Scheer Partners was asked to analyze the property from technical and financial standpoints, and to manage the plant during the marketing process. Scheer Partners officials spent considerable time evaluating the internal infrastructure and equipment in the facility so that they could effectively market and manage it.
By completely understanding the product that they were marketing, Scheer Partners was able to determine whether companies that expressed interest would, in fact, be appropriate users for the facility. Scheer Partners also advised MdBio on the market and designed pro formas on different scenarios, such as the timing and the costs associated with converting the use of the property, if necessary.
Built in 1995, the MdBio Research Center – situated on 5.3 acres along with three acres of potential expansion capacity – has direct access from the Harbor Tunnel (I-895) and features seven labs connected to a pilot plant that contains five compartmentalized suites, allowing for up to five different manufacturing processes to simultaneously occur.
While Emergent will revalidate the facility in accordance with FDA Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), the infrastructure and systems are in place to facilitate the transition, according to Robert Scheer. “It’s a unique asset, and all parties concerned are delighted with the outcome,” he says.