Less than a year after buying Gaithersburg's Viela Bio Inc., Dublin’s Horizon Therapeutics PLC is planning a big expansion in Montgomery County.
Horizon (NASDAQ: HZNP) has signed a full-building lease with Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. (NYSE: ARE) to open an East Coast research and development hub in Rockville, the biotech announced Thursday. The 192,000-square-foot office and lab will be the first to come online at Alexandria Center at Traville Gateway, where Pasadena, California-based Alexandria plans to build a total of 500,000 square feet of life sciences buildings across 18 acres.
The building for Horizon is already under construction and is slated to be delivered to the biotech for interior buildout in 2023.
Horizon closed on its purchase of Viela Bio, a spinout of Medimmune before its purchase by AstraZeneca, in March for $3 billion. Horizon currently has offices in Gaithersburg and Rockville, both of which are former Viela facilities, according to a Horizon spokesperson. The Montgomery County Economic Development Corp. says that Horizon’s new lease will triple the company’s footprint in the county.
A spokesperson for Horizon said the company has not disclosed how many jobs it expects to create with the new facility; he also said that any incentives that may come from the state or the county "have not been determined at this time."
“With this new facility we are ... creating a hub that will support job growth, drive our company’s continued efforts to develop new medicines for patients with rare, autoimmune and severe inflammatory diseases and meet the needs of our expanding pipeline," Tim Walbert, chairman, president and CEO of Horizon, said in a statement. "We look forward to expanding our presence in Maryland and appreciate the support from local, state and federal officials who recognize the economic and community value of the life science industry.”
Montgomery County, home to the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, has pinned many of its economic development hopes on biotech and life sciences growth; Ben Wu, president and CEO of Montgomery County Economic Development Corp., has said that he would like to make the county the "immunology capital" of the world. MoCo has landed many new biotech headquarters and expansions in recent years, and companies with a presence there pulled in $8 billion in funding in 2020. The county worked with the state to continue that momentum in 2021 with the launch of the Montgomery/Maryland Life Sciences Education and Innovation Partnership.
“Horizon Therapeutics, a company with operations around the world, had the opportunity to see the incredible life sciences ecosystem in Montgomery County when they acquired Viela Bio and now they are substantially expanding their footprint and employment base,” Wu said in a statement. “Traville Gateway is adding critical capacity to meet surging lab space demand as more life sciences companies look to come to Montgomery County.”
