Rockville, MD – For start-up and emerging biotechnology companies looking to secure new facilities, Firstfield Road in Montgomery County has become a choice location.
The latest example is contract research organization Noble Life Sciences, a relatively new company that assists clients in conducting research to advance human health, particularly through the facilitation of personalized medicine. Last year, five veteran biotech industry leaders formed Noble Life Sciences to meet the research-and-development needs of clients in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors, as well as academia.
Initially, Noble Life Sciences took space at the Maryland Technology Development Center, an incubator in Rockville managed by Scheer Partners. As the privately held company has grown, it necessitated additional space.
Scheer Partners, the leading provider of fully integrated commercial real estate services for the health science industry in the Washington and Baltimore metropolitan areas, announces today that it has represented Noble Life Sciences in a 78-month lease for 6,200 square feet of laboratory and administrative space at 22 Firstfield Road, a roughly 50,000-square-foot building in Gaithersburg that is 100 percent leased and home to tenants such as ATCC, Intercell and MaxCyte.
In the new lease transaction, Scheer Partners Founder and President Robert Scheer, Senior Vice President Henry Bernstein and Vice President Matt Brady represented Noble Life Sciences, while the building’s owner, Pasadena, Calif.-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities, represented itself. Noble Life Sciences maintains its small amount of space at the Rockville incubator, while planning a move in the coming weeks to its new digs.
“We’re extremely pleased to have negotiated a lease at 22 Firstfield Road in Gaithersburg for Noble Life Sciences,” Brady says. “This is a growing company with a tremendous management team and unbelievable expertise in cancer research. We think that the firm’s new space will suit them very well.”
Noble Life Sciences is providing its services – including high-level animal studies and sophisticated modeling for clinical trials – to small and mid-sized companies in the local biotech community. The president and CEO of Noble Life Sciences is Ken Carter, who previously co-founded and served as CEO for 10 years at Germantown-based Avalon Pharmaceuticals, which Clinical Data acquired in 2009. Other members of Noble Life Sciences’ executive ranks include several former colleagues of Carter’s at Avalon Pharmaceuticals.
In recent months, a handful of other promising start-up biotech firms, such as Integrated BioTherapeutics and Zyngenia, have signed on for space along Firstfield Road. Scheer Partners executives expect that trend to continue for the foreseeable future.
“It’s a terrific location for small and mid-sized biotech companies,” Brady says. “The amenities surrounding Firstfield Road are plentiful, and there are many private-sector biotech businesses, academic institutions and federal labs in the vicinity for potential collaboration.”