Developer Trammell Crow Company will develop a new life sciences campus on land owned by Johns Hopkins University in Montgomery County’s Shady Grove to meet growing demand for R&D space by the county’s growing life-sciences industry.
Initial plans call for 757,000 square feet of world-class lab and research space across three buildings, with the potential to grow to 1.6 million square feet across seven buildings.
Construction will begin in June of 2023, with expected completion of the initial phase in early 2025.
Trammell Crow is leasing 20.6 acres of land owned by Johns Hopkins University. The Labs at Belward would be part of the school’s Belward Campus.
“The location within Shady Grove places the labs in Maryland’s preeminent life science node, close to innovative companies that are contributing to the area’s life sciences sector growth,” said Eric Fischer, managing director of Trammell Crow’s mid-Atlantic office.
The life sciences campus will also include a six-acre park with an amphitheater, recreational fields and two pavilions.
Clark Construction will be the general contractor. Gensler is the project’s architect and CBRE will manage marketing and leasing for lab and research space on the campus.
Both Montgomery County and Maryland, overall, are among national leaders in the biotechnology sector, with more than 650 companies operating in bio-health in Maryland, including biotechnology and medical device manufacturers. The majority of them are early-stage companies.
Those companies are attracted to the region both for inexpensive lab space and proximity to government agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, but also for the educated workforce. In Montgomery County, 32% of the adult population has a graduate degree, and 10% of all occupations in the county are STEM-related, according to JLL’s mid-Atlantic life sciences practice.
