Chicago-based Singerman Real Estate and HATCHspaces in Los Angeles have bought a former Amgen Inc. building in Thousand Oaks as part of its joint venture, the companies said on Tuesday.The purchase price was not disclosed for the all-cash transaction, completed Oct. 29. This is the second project the joint venture has acquired in Thousand Oaks. The team purchased the 160,980-square-foot Think Here campus at 2380 Conejo Spectrum St. in August of last year.The 50,000-square-foot building serves as a small molecule manufacturing facility, the joint venture said in a statement. That’s space in which small molecule drugs are made through chemical synthesis.Small molecule drugs, like aspirin, are made up of simple chemical compounds, compared to biologics therapies, which are made using living organisms such as bacteria, yeast and cells.Amgen originally purchased the building in 1991; the biotech giant spent more than $30 million ensuring current good manufacturing practice regulations, referred to as cGMP, were met at the drug development facility. The joint venture calls the building a turnkey facility for biotech startups to use, especially those working in the pharmaceutical space, as the industry figures out how to meet manufacturing goals of the federal project Operation Warp Speed and the COVID-19 pandemic.“Manufacturing capabilities are essential to the continued growth of any life science cluster,” Allan Glass, co-founder of HATCHspaces said in a statement. “The greater Los Angeles market has continued to mature over the past few years, and we have seen renewed interest in this market from companies interested in relocating to Southern California as they grow.”“The industry has proven its resilience and importance over a very tumultuous 2020,” Howard Kozloff, also a co-founder of HATCH, added in the joint venture statement. “Our goal is to grow our portfolio to one million square feet of purpose-built science facilities across Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.”
