Life Sciences

In the fall of 2012, VSP Global, an eyewear and ophthalmic technology and benefits company that employs more than 2,000 people in the Greater Sacramento community of Rancho Cordova, had just about had it with California.

Australia's Lend Lease participated last week in the groundbreaking ceremony for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ new Healthcare Center in Kernersville, N.C., part of the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point metro area.

Does workplace wellness correspond to the economic vitality of a company or an area? If so, then the new 2014 Healthiest Workplaces in America rankings tell us the Midwest is fit as a fiddle.

When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in September signed into law the New Jersey Economic Opportunity Act, streamlining the state’s incentive programs to two, he did so on the heels of two ribbon-cuttings.

First, on Dec. 4 during a trade mission to Brazil, Gov. Martin O’Malley announced that Brace Pharmaceuticals, an investment company created by EMS S/A, Brazil’s largest domestic pharmaceutical company, has opened its U.S. headquarters in Montgomery County and plans to invest $200 million in the new operation.

LEED certification is soooo 2012. WELL certification, says one real estate developer, is what’s next, as employers aim to bring as much good energy to your health as they bring to your workplace.

At the SelectUSA Investment Summit in Washington, D.C., this fall, a panel discussion on partnering with US universities featured Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson and University of Maryland Vice President and Chief Research Officer Patrick O'Shea, who set the stage.

It’s been a relatively quiet year for facility investment projects from Merck KGaA, the life sciences and chemical firm that employs more than 38,000 around the world and reported 2012 revenues of more than US$15 billion.

“Site Selection for Life Sciences Companies,” a report released this month by business intelligence firm Venture Valuation and KPMG, uses an agglomeration of other reports and proprietary data to analyze key decision factors relevant to the leading life sciences clusters in France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK.

The typical university research park is 119 acres, has seven buildings open and is located in a suburban jurisdiction with a population of 500,000 or less.

Read any publication, scan any website — there are few topics hotter than health-care services right now.

When medical device and equipment supply chain organization Qmed recently named its top-tier US states for medical technology, Michigan made the Top 10, partly by virtue of the precision skills base that is a legacy of the automotive industry.

One year ago, as reported in this space, Roche wound down a site search that considered 50 East Coast sites but chose only one.

What do poet Ezra Pound, Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau, silent film actress Mary Claire Fuller, original Oxford English Dictionary contributor Dr. William Chester Minor and LSD champion and manufacturer Augustus Stanley Owsley III have in common?

It was a few years ago that global healthcare information software and analytics firm Cerner Corp. was about to invest $1 billion at the blighted Bannister Mall site in southeast Kansas City, Mo., when it was suddenly pulled over to Kansas City, Kan., and Wyandotte County with its 4,000-job campus and expansion.

Even as New York's largest biotech company keeps reinvesting at two locations in its native New York, it's also looking abroad to the Emerald Isle. And it's planning to reignite a once-hot Dell manufacturing site in the process.

For a surfer, the green room is the best place to be. It's when you're inside the barrel of a wave, and the water gives the light a greenish, otherworldly glow. "A great place to be," says one surfing glossary.

Paris-based healthcare and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi last month announced an expansion of its partnership with GDF SUEZ energy services subsidiary Cofely that will implement primarily renewable energy production and distribution systems worth up to €80 million at Sanofi industrial sites around the world over the next five years.

Last week Princeton, N.J.–based Bristol-Myers Squibb became the latest to latch on to a life sciences wave striking Florida.

Earlier this month CBRE Group, Inc. Global Research and Consulting issued an insightful report on biotech research space in New York City, and the need for it to catch up to the Big Apple’s boom in biotech activity.

The National Institutes of Health made news this week when it announced it plans to substantially reduce the use of chimpanzees in NIH-funded biomedical research and designate for retirement most of the chimpanzees it currently owns or supports.

Talk to enough corporate real estate and facility executives around the world and you'll be astonished at how often big projects and decisions hinge on the unglamorous subject of parking.