Building a Bioscience Cluster in East Los Angeles

East Los Angeles is shaping up to be one of the unlikely centers of southern California’s emerging bioscience industry. Bioscience has long had a presence in Los Angeles, given its collection of leading medical centers and universities. However, for years it has been overlooked as a destination for life science innovation and investment as San Francisco, Boston, and San Diego emerged as bioscience cluster powerhouses. Now, thanks to a shared vision among city and county leaders, local universities, and the bioscience industry, a concerted, cross-sector effort is activating a network of bioscience clusters across the region. East Los Angeles is one of those nodes.

The eastside cluster, known as the LA Bioscience Corridor, is anchored by the LAC+USC Medical Center and the USC Health Sciences Campus on the west, and California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State L.A.) and Grifols (a multinational pharmaceutical company) on the east. At the center of these university and research centers is a promising stretch of underused industrial land that is ready for redevelopment.

A key piece to cultivating bioscience innovation and industry depends on real estate—having lab space to operate and grow a life science startup. The LA Bioscience Corridor is home to some of Los Angeles’s last remaining industrial land. Unlike other parts of the region where industrial land is being rezoned for residential conversion, this East Los Angeles area is primed for hosting the next wave of manufacturing and production.

When real estate investment partners Agora Partners and ASG Real Estate came upon an 80-year-old, 22,000-square-foot (2,000 sq m) furniture factory and warehouse in the corridor, they saw the potential and opportunity to create that new generation of industrial space for East Los Angeles, and advance the vision for creating a thriving bioscience hub.

“We were looking for a particular building type in a more affordable neighborhood, when we came upon this building, which has great bones and is really beautiful. It quickly became important to understand how bioscience uses could fit within this type of building,” says Howard Kozloff, managing partner of Agora Partners.

The abandoned furniture warehouse was purchased and readied for adaptive use. The building, aptly named HATCH, will provide flexible working space to emerging bioscience companies that have outgrown their incubators and require purpose-built, dedicated lab and office space.

HATCH is regarded as a much-needed and valuable contribution to Los Angeles’s bioscience ecosystem. Part of the vision for this area is to create a place where companies can translate cutting-edge academic research into commercialized medical treatments and technologies that make it into hospitals and doctors’ offices.

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