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Commercial
Los Angeles

Irvine Company to build life science complex next to UC campus

Four-building, 532K sf project would be largest life science hub in OC

Irvine Company's Donald Bren with rendering of UCI Research Park near MacArthur Boulevard and University Drive (Irvine Company, Getty)
Irvine Company's Donald Bren with rendering of UCI Research Park near MacArthur Boulevard and University Drive (Irvine Company, Getty)

The Irvine Company wants to build a 532,000-square-foot life science office complex next to the UC Irvine campus.

The Orange County real estate giant based in Newport Beach plans to construct four office and research buildings at its UCI Research Park at 100 Innovation Drive in Irvine, the Orange County Business Journal reported.

The four-story offices, known as Academy Point, would be built at the northwest corner of the 36-building business park next to the University of California at Irvine, according to an Irvine Company brochure.

Plans call for four 128,000-square-foot buildings, with lab-ready offices geared for medical, healthcare and biotechnology tenants. It would be the largest life science project in the county.

The development site for Academy Point near MacArthur Boulevard and University Drive is fenced off and largely graded.

The developer could break ground on the life science campus by the end of the year, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Other local brokers suggest market conditions may put a hold on construction until life science tenants are secured, according to the Business Journal.

Academy Point would be the only life science campus with direct access to UC Irvine, leading research hospitals, medical device companies and life science incubators in Orange County, according to a website for the project.

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“We really need a purpose-built incubator lab building for life science startups in OC, like they have done in San Diego,” Greg May of Newmark told the Business Journal. “It would be great for OC if they built it.”

San Diego, with 21 million square feet of life science offices and 3.7 million square feet under construction, is the third-largest life science market in the U.S, behind the Bay Area and No. 1 Boston.
Orange County has the fourth-largest life science workforce in California, according to marketing materials for Academy Point.

The county checks all the boxes of what life science tenants are looking for: academic collaboration, quality of life and industry synergies to attract and retain a talented workforce, said Nico Napolitano and Jeff Cole of Cushman & Wakefield, in an email to the newspaper.

But the region “has yet to deliver a concentrated life sciences cluster location that provides the synergies required by inquiring tenants,” they said. Irvine’s Academy Point would “set the trap on what will be the epicenter of the next ‘core cluster’ SoCal life sciences market.”

Academy Point would be the latest investment from Irvine Company for its 185-acre UCI Research Park. It spent $100 million to upgrade the campus in 2018 after the departure of Broadcom, which once took up more than 900,000 square feet.

— Dana Bartholomew

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Commercial Real EstateIrvine CompanyLife-sciencesOrange County