Research and Development

Komatsu Mining Corp. is planning to construct a new $285 million headquarters campus in Milwaukee. The project will include an administrative office building with an integrated research center and a company museum. A 430,000-sf manufacturing facility will also be built on the 54-acre site. Groundbreaking will occur in late 2019 with completion expected in 2022. Subsequent phases of development may include the expansion of both structures and the construction of a second manufacturing building.

Eastern Michigan University is engaged in a $40 million renovation of Sill Hall in Ypsilanti. Featuring highly adaptable infrastructure for optimal flexibility, the $40 million project will create sophisticated laboratories and experiential learning environments for the College of Engineering and Technology.

Nexus Pharmaceuticals will begin construction in August of 2019 on a $250 million manufacturing complex in Pleasant Prairie, Wis. The multi-phase project will be delivered over the next ten years, enabling Nexus to expand its production capacity for sterile injectable drugs. The first phase comprises an $85 million manufacturing building featuring an advanced isolator system and multiple lyophilization machines. The three-story, 84,450-sf structure was designed by Integrated Project Services and will be built by Turner Construction.

The University of Illinois at Chicago is planning to build the $96 million Computing, Design, Research and Learning Center. Designed by Booth Hansen to support new instructional paradigms, the 168,000-sf facility will provide auditoria, lecture halls, dry research labs, interdisciplinary student design space, faculty and staff offices, and collaboration areas. The Department of Computer Science will be housed in the building, which will feature flexible classrooms comprised of modules that can be easily adapted to accommodate diverse class sizes and types.

Eli Lilly and Company is building a 45,000-sf headquarters facility in Basingstoke in the United Kingdom. Located in the Basing View Enterprise Zone, the project is being built by Muse Developments with Morgan Sindall Construction as general contractor. Designed by TP Bennett, the facility will provide open offices, conference rooms, and collaboration spaces to support the production of Eli Lilly's innovative pharmaceutical therapies. The leased building will be owned by the Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council.

The term “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4IR) was coined in 2016 by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, to describe the exponential transformation society and commerce are experiencing due to converging breakthroughs in numerous fields, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, the internet of things (IoT), and quantum computing. While this latest advancement is to some degree an extension of the third revolution (aka: The Digital Revolution), 4IR is considered a new era because of the unprecedented speed, scope, and systems impact of the coming changes. It is evolving at an exponential rate rather than a linear one and is expected to disrupt entire systems of production, management, transportation, and governance on a global scale. In response, a new breed of interdisciplinary research facility is emerging, as academic institutions try to anticipate training students for the unforeseen demands of the 4IR.

Tergus Pharma began construction in July of 2019 on a cGMP commercial manufacturing facility in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. An existing 100,000-sf building will undergo renovation to become the company's headquarters, providing production suites, laboratories, offices, packaging lines, and a GMP warehouse. The $35 million project will also include a clinical trial materials manufacturing space and suites for the creation of high-potency compounds and hormones. Completion is expected in early 2020.

Purdue University will begin construction in spring of 2020 on the $140 million Gateway Complex in West Lafayette, Ind. Designed by BSA LifeStructures and Ennead Architects, the multidisciplinary project will provide instructional labs, design studios, collaboration spaces, and active learning environments for the College of Engineering and the Purdue Polytechnic Institute.

The University of Manitoba opened the $44.5 million Smartpark Innovation Hub in Winnipeg in June of 2019. Designed by Cibinel Architecture to foster collaborative partnerships between industry, academia, and government, the 75,000-sf facility provides laboratories, prototyping suites, multimedia training classrooms, conference rooms, a business incubator, and rentable space for companies.

ElevateBio has selected DPS Group and TRIA to design ElevateBio BaseCamp, a 108,000-sf cGMP development and manufacturing facility in Waltham. Located in a 430,000-sf office and lab building, the facility will offer integrated R&D, process development, and cGMP manufacturing services for novel therapeutic technologies.

Imagine a baby born today. She’s smart and science-minded. Through good luck and hard work, she earns her doctorate early, and by age 31, she is solidly embarked on a research career. What does her lab look like? That’s what two SmithGroup thought leaders—Adam Denmark, director of Laboratory Planning, and Steve Palumbo, Science and Technology Studio leader—sought to find out with their team members though a yearlong research initiative they called LAB2050. Collectively, the SmithGroup team and their client advisors defined six categories that they used to project current trends forward—technology, funding and partnerships, energy and the environment, collaboration, synergies, and planning and design—and to visualize the new ones that might emerge.

The University of Windsor celebrated the opening of the CAD$30 million Essex Centre of Research (CORe) in June of 2019 in Windsor, Ontario. Designed by NORR and Hariri Pontarini Architects, the 46,000-sf facility was constructed as an addition to Essex Hall and provides collaborative wet and dry laboratories for the study of advanced materials, transitional health, and medical physics.

Texas A&M University opened the $104 million Medical Research and Education Building II (MREB II) in June of 2019 in Bryan, Texas. Designed by Flad Architects and OMNIPLAN, the 155,077-sf project comprises a 48,200-sf vertical expansion to the existing Medical Research and Education Building (MREB I) and a 122,800-sf addition, enabling the College of Medicine's basic science departments to be collocated in a single campus.

Vermeulens has released its market outlook report for the first quarter of 2019. Key points include:

The University of Missouri System broke ground on the $221 million NextGen Precision Health Institute in June of 2019. Located at the University of Missouri-Columbia, the five-story, 265,000-sf translational research facility will accommodate over 60 principal investigators working in collaboration with industry partners to develop innovative personalized medicine solutions.