BeiGene’s purchase of a 42-acre portion at the former Bristol Myers Squibb is complete as real estate company Lincoln Equities Group announced the finalized purchase in late November.
The announcement by Lincoln Equities Group (LEG) came on Nov. 23. LEG officially adds another pharmaceutical company to the campus in Hopewell Township with the addition of BeiGene, a global biopharmaceutical company focused on cancer medicine.
“We are excited to welcome BeiGene as an anchor tenant within our new Princeton West Innovation Campus,” said LEG President Joel Bergstein in a statement. “Our 1.2 million-square-foot life sciences site, formerly owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb, is an ideal location for both manufacturing and R&D given its existing infrastructure and prime location along New Jersey’s life sciences corridor.”
LEG has been seeking to attract pharmaceutical companies to the site since purchasing the former BMS campus in 2020.
The 42-acres purchased by BeiGene would be constructed into a new state-of-the-art manufacturing campus and clinical research and development center.
With BeiGene developing and marketing cancer medicines the new facility is currently planned to include about 400,000 square feet for pharmaceutical manufacturing, contain clinical research and development, 16,000 liters of biologics capacity and office space.
The project’s construction is expected to start sometime in 2022 as the project is expected to be complete in 2023 or 2024.
According to BeiGene, the company plans to invest several hundred million dollars in the initial construction.
The former BMS campus property covers 430 acres, 200 of which are dedicated to preserved farmland and open space on Pennington-Rocky Hill Road.
The township in 2019 had amended the land use ordinance, allowing this property to be subdivided with multiple owners.
When BMS still owned the property, one of the first tenants to ink a leasing deal to the property was PTC Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company.
The company signed a long-term lease for about 185,000 square feet of space, which included an existing state-of-the-art biological production facility, and supporting research and operations buildings on the BMS campus.
An official ribbon cutting ceremony by PTC Therapeutics took place on Oct. 14 at their new facility’s location at the campus on 311 Pennington-Rocky Hill Road.
The PTC Therapeutics facility contains office space, manufacturing and laboratory space, and state-of-the art technology equipped to handle process development and manufacturing of plasmids and adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors
Back in 2020, the life sciences campus, formerly owned by BMS, was purchased by Lincoln Equities Group and H.I.G. Realty Partners.
According to LEG, the campus features nine principal buildings consisting of state-of-the-art clinical manufacturing, plug-and-play biological laboratories and office space, plus freestanding research and development support space, storage facilities and a global data and command center.
The campus is supported by a central utility complex (CUC), which provides wastewater management, generator-backed electricity, chilled water and steam.
