InterVenn Scrubs Lease for Offices and Labs in South SF

InterVenn Biosciences has torn up its 10-year-lease for a 142,000-square-foot building in South San Francisco.

The biotech startup based in the city has canceled its lease for the office and research building at 499 Forbes Boulevard, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The lease was signed a year ago with San Francisco-based Aralon Properties. Terms of the exit agreement were not disclosed.

The lease represented a major expansion for InterVenn, which investigates new ways to detect and treat cancer. The firm was founded in 2017 in Redwood City, then relocated to the biotech hub of South San Francisco.

The original lease worked out to about $84 per square foot on an annualized basis.

But in the last year, many life sciences companies have cut costs as Wall Street pulls out from lengthy biotech investments, according to the Business Times. At the same time, venture capitalists have demanded portfolio companies hit key milestones to unlock more cash.

The once-booming Bay Area life sciences real estate market now contends with oversupply and a biotech industry funding shortfall. Few initial public offerings over the past 18 months have also cut demand for offices and labs.

More than 1.12 million square feet of existing labs hit the Bay Area sublease market in the first quarter, according to an analysis by Rico Cheung, a specialist in life sciences at Colliers.

That’s in addition to nearly 817,000 square feet directly listed by landlords during the period.

It’s unusual to have sublease space exceed direct listings in life sciences real estate, Cheung said.

Despite the market, Dallas-based Trammell Crow last month proposed a nearly 750,000-square-foot life science campus in South San Francisco

Aralon has listed the building at 499 Forbes. Broker Joe Cammarata of Kidder Mathews and Gregg Domanico and Michael Domanico of CBRE hold the listing, either for single or multiple tenants.

InterVenn, led by co-founder and CEO Erwin Estigarria, has raised nearly $300 million, and is based at 2 Tower Place in South San Francisco. It also has sites in the Philippines, Malaysia and Australia.

— Dana Bartholomew