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Venter Institute Sells Rockville Campus for $53M; Will Continue Research There

By a GenomeWeb staff reporter

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — The J. Craig Venter Institute has sold its Rockville, Md., headquarters campus to BioMed Realty Trust for $53 million, but will continue to carry out research there under a 10-year renewable sale-leaseback agreement with the buyer, JCVI said today.

JCVI fully leases the campus, which consists of five buildings totaling 218,000 square feet, located at 9704-9714 Medical Center Drive. Some 300 scientists and support staffers are based at the campus, while another 100 scientists and support staffers are employed at JCVI's San Diego campus.

J. Craig Venter, JCVI's founder and president, said in a statement that the sale-leaseback "will enable us to remain financially sound for the foreseeable future, and ensure that we can continue our groundbreaking genomic science."

JCVI was formed in October 2006 through the merger of three affiliated organizations — the Institute for Genomic Research, the J. Craig Venter Institute, and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation.

The deal with Venter is BioMed Realty's second acquisition of life-science property along the I-270 corridor in Maryland's Montgomery County this year. On March 1, the REIT announced it had acquired two fully-leased life science buildings totaling about 82,400 square feet in Gaithersburg, Md., for $14.4 million. The buildings are leased to MedImmune and GenVec.

The JCVI campus acquisition expands BioMed Realty's Maryland portfolio to six properties, consisting of 15 buildings and 1.4 million rentable square feet of life-science space. BioMed Realty is headquartered in San Diego.