What is a Mega Campus?

Can you briefly describe what a mega campus is?

So, it's interesting. Let's take a step and talk about the history of big pharma and biotech in the United States. Originally, a lot of these small molecule companies, big pharma companies, developing drugs, created a centralized campus where they put all their facilities together basically one stop shopping: their research, their development, their testing. So basically, they had Labs, which is the R side of R&D, they had development, which is pilot and preclinical to post clinical and commercialized manufacturing. They had vivarium where a lot of the animal testing is done in those clinical trials. They had office space that obviously would deal with support of the lab practices. And they had, usually these fitness centers and cafeterias that would obviously support a centralized population that came and went back and forth every day. Over time, these campuses fell out of fashion.

But Big Pharma, over the years, became decentralized, where they became private equity funds, where they had so much cash on their balance sheets that they would actually outsource research and development. They'd grow through acquisition of smaller and mid-sized companies. So, it became less efficient for these big pharma companies to have decentralized campuses because they had so many portfolio companies across the nation.

Now let's fast forward to today. It's very interesting because a lot of companies that are smaller or mid-sized in nature love to have or be a part of an environment where it has all these amenities, both life science focused and non-life science focused. The life science focus we talked about is manufacturing, the vivarium, obviously, the research facilities, but also, like I said, the fitness centers, the cafeteria, the other amenities that people actually care about: the bike rooms, all that. So, these growing companies, it's amazing that they can actually step into some of these spaces. We have a project in New Jersey, NEST, the Northeast Science and Technology Center, and it's Merck's world headquarters that we acquired last year with Onyx equities. And we're repurposing that mega campus, if you will, right to and we're rationalizing that into a multi-tenant campus.

The key on these mega campuses is that these large pharma companies spent well in excess of $1,000 a square foot on these campuses because they have a spec that's held to the absolute highest standard, companies like Merck, Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi, and so on and so forth. So, when you're a small company and you lack the liquidity or the balance sheet of some of these big pharma companies, it's phenomenal that you can get space that a big pharma built right without coming out of your pocket. Even though it's second generation space, it was built to such a high spec that anyone can really come in there. It's fully translational to pretty much any modality or other science because these big pharma campuses, or these mega campuses, built space that was you can actually do two types of science: chemistry, which is typically small molecule science, as well as biology focused chemistry, larger molecule today that people are talking about immunotherapy, cell and gene therapy, things of that nature.

So that's kind of the take today on a mega campus, a campus that has all the facilities that attend from small tenants to mid-size tenants and large tenants can grow and be in an ecosystem that covers all these bases. That's my take on a mega campus, so to speak.