First came the plan with an historic nine-figure sum of financial backing.
Now, the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the University of Pittsburgh have landed an anchoring life sciences industry partner to jumpstart a major project at Hazelwood Green to help launch a largely new industry for the region.
After announcing a $100 million dollar gift to help launch such a development last November, the RK Mellon Foundation and the University of Pittsburgh have now announced Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ElevateBio LLC as the new strategic partner to help build and activate the new Pitt BioForge, a specialized biomanufacturing facility.
David Hallal, chairman and CEO of ElevateBio, said his company has reached a 30-year agreement to locate his company's next "BaseCamp" process development and manufacturing facility in Pittsburgh.
Describing his team as "super excited" to be pursuing the project in partnership with Pitt and others, Hallal added it's a project that's "really responding to the tremendous growth that exists right now for next-generation technology."
It's expected to be an 80,000-square-foot component of the larger BioForge project in partnership with Pitt, the full development of which is expected to total around 250,000 square feet and cost in the range of $250 million to build on an approximately 3.5-acre site within the Mill District portion of Hazelwood Green.
The building will be owned by Pitt through an agreement with Tishman Speyer, the New York-based real estate firm that the foundation owners of the 178-acre former brownfield chose to be the master developer of Hazelwood Green in February.
A major component of the facility will also include a manufacturing collaborative space in which ElevateBio will be a lead partner with Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University and others.
ElevateBio will be a leased tenant of the new complex for its BaseCamp, through which it provides contract research capabilities for developing and manufacturing cell and gene therapies. But the company will also serve as a partner in the larger facility as well.
An announcement from Gov. Tom Wolf indicated ElevateBio will invest $35 million in capital expenditures as well as commit to bring 172 high-paying jobs to the new facility — a project in which the Governor's Action Team is investing $860,000 in grant funding among other potential sources of state support.
ElevateBio, started in 2017, launched its 140,000-square-foot BaseCamp in Waltham, Massachusetts, a few years ago, helping to provide something of a template of the BioForge project to come at Hazelwood Green.
Sam Reiman, director of the RK Mellon Foundation, whose $100 million gift was the largest single-project grant in the institution's history, described the Waltham BaseCamp as both "one of the most impressive bio manufacturing facilities in the world" and "exactly what we had in mind."
"While the foundation provided a grant that helped to serve as a catalyst, this really is driven by the vision and leadership at ElevateBio," Reiman said. "Their ideas of what is possible here in Pittsburgh are exceptional."
The Pitt BioForge BioManufacturing Center is being created to both elevate Pittsburgh's standing in biotech as well as answer challenges that have arisen among the region's biotech companies after they reach a certain stage of development. There are many companies, spun out of either the University of Pittsburgh, UPMC, Carnegie Mellon University or elsewhere, that find a challenge as they near the clinical trial stage of advancement. Many have to move their headquarters and operations to San Francisco or Boston, for instance, because that's where the large-scale manufacturing facilities, industry partners and funding are.
"There are expertise and the industry processes that make these companies not able to survive here beyond a certain stage," said Dr. Anantha Shekhar, Pitt's senior vice chancellor for the health sciences. "What this will do is for us to be able to say not only can we spin off companies, but those companies can produce products all the way to FDA approval and national distribution criteria."
Plans call for design and construction to begin in the early part of 2023, with the plan to start making the products in the first quarter of 2026. The employment expectation of 170 full-time jobs at the center when it's up and running would be half from ElevateBio and the other half Pitt research staff.
"One of the things that we're going to start doing is begin hiring people and train them at the Boston facility, so that when we do our ribbon cutting in '26, there's already a team that has been specifically hired to work in Pittsburgh," Shekhar said.
Pittsburgh beat out a suburb of Boston, near ElevateBio's first BaseCamp, as well as Philadelphia for the new BioCamp development. That's not lost on Shekhar, who thinks it's the combination of the innovation and research firepower of Pitt and CMU along with the clinical excellence of UPMC that made Pittsburgh special.
"The value proposition for them is that Pittsburgh is a great academic setting. It's got Pitt and CMU, really in many ways the equivalent of having Harvard and MIT," he said. "We have high-end health care facilities as well. We have the full-scale opportunities and future similar to Boston, but we are essentially 50% of the cost of something like that in Boston."
It's an announcement of comparable magnitude to that of RK Mellon's November $100 million gift, with a host of public officials and political leaders issuing statements in praise of ElevateBio's new involvement in the plan.
Patrick Gallagher, chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, said, "This announcement supports the region's rise as a leader in cell and gene therapy and advances our vision of bringing an entirely new commercial manufacturing sector to the area. The University of Pittsburgh is proud to partner with ElevateBio in this work, which will see us leveraging lessons from the lab — in new and exciting ways — for the benefit of human health."
Hallal emphasized the project, expected to need 900 construction workers to build as well as other support personnel, is moving forward in planning and design.
"We’re rolling up our sleeves and rolling up the design work now," he said.
Reiman said the chance to bring in ElevateBio was more an example of "great relationship building" than the exact result of a prepared plan.
"I’d like to tell you that his was all preordained with some level of precision. But that just wasn’t the case," he said. "It’s an example of how things take on a life of their own."
