Bristol Myers Squibb to Shut 256K sf Campus in Redwood City

Bristol Myers Squibb will close a 256,000-square-foot campus in Redwood City and squish operations into its Brisbane offices to cut costs.

The New Jersey-based drugmaker will vacate the three buildings in Woodside Technology Park at 700-740 Bay Road, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The move comes after the biopharmaceutical firm announced it had lost $11.91 billion on revenue of $11.86 billion in the first quarter, with plans to cut 2,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in costs.

The company’s research campus in Redwood City, a center of its focus on cancer immunotherapy programs, will close. The campus is owned by BioMed Realty, a real estate investment trust based in San Diego owned by Blackstone, based in New York.

The two-story campus contains a 133,000-square-foot building and two 60,000-square-foot buildings, with a 250-seat auditorium. BioMed renewed its lease with Bristol Myers Squibb in 2016, which ends in 2027.

The drug company had consolidated its cancer immunotherapy operations from Milpitas and Sunnyvale to the redeveloped Redwood City campus after its $2.4 billion acquisition in 2009 of Medarex.

Bristol Myers Squibb will move its employees from Redwood City into a four-year-old development in Brisbane, where the firm took over a 129,800-square-foot lease after its 2020 purchase of heart disease drug developer MyoKardia for $13.1 billion.

The firm will consolidate its Bay Area operations at 1200 Sierra Point Parkway in The Shore at Sierra Point, a five-building, 616,000-square-foot office and research campus opened in 2020 by Healthpeak Properties, based in Denver.

Bristol Myers Squibb didn’t disclose its plans for a 55,800-square-foot research facility it picked up in San Francisco’s Mission Bay during a $74 billion acquisition in 2019 of Celgene, according to the Business Journal.

Owners of life science offices and research laboratories are seeing a spike in vacancies across the Bay Area. Developments for a once-booming biotech sector have created a glut, with vacancy now more than 20 percent and subleases at discounts from 30 to 40 percent, according to brokerage CBRE.

— Dana Bartholomew