MPM Capital, a venture firm with a focus on life sciences, has signed a lease to relocate from Boston’s John Hancock Tower to larger space in Kendall Square, said MPM’s new landlord, BioMed Realty Trust.
A San Diego-based real estate investment trust with a large presence in the Boston area, BioMed Realty said that MPM has just agreed to move into 14,500 square feet of space in April at 450 Kendall St. in Cambridge.
When completed, 450 Kendall St. will be a five-story building with about 63,000 square feet of space. BioMed has three other properties nearby, including the Genzyme building at 500 Kendall St.
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MPM managing director Todd Foley said that his firm needs more space to incubate startups and that Kendall Square, with its proximity to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, is the ideal place to do that.
According to Foley, MPM does more than simply write out a check to the companies it invests in. For MPM, “incubate” is an action verb, with MPM playing an active role in the startups it backs.
In many cases, those startups are looking to commercialize on research that came out of MIT and Harvard and they want to stay close by.
As a result, MPM directors and associates are “constantly hopping across the river,” Foley said.
Among the biotechnology firms that were incubated and backed by MPM was CoStim Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Cambridge company that used research from Boston academic labs to work on a pipeline of drugs that stimulate a patient’s immune system to fight cancer.
Earlier this year, CoStim was snapped up by Swiss drug giant Novartis AG for an undisclosed price.
Another company incubated and backed by MPM is Mitokyne Inc. of Boston, which is collaborating with Astellas Pharma Inc. in an agreement that could earn Mikotyne up to $730 million. According to Reuters, the collaboration is focusing on discovering and developing drugs that improve mitochondrial functions. These drug candidates have the potential to treat genetic, metabolic, or neurodegenerative disorders as well as conditions of aging.
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MPM originally started out in Cambridge and after about a decade in Boston, the firm is eager to return as the critical mass of biotech and life sciences expertise is rapidly expanding, Foley said.
In September, health care giant Baxter International Inc. said it is leasing about 200,000 square feet of office space in Kendall Square to open a biopharmaceutical research center that will employ at least 400 people. Baxter, based in a Chicago suburb, has signed a 12-year lease at 650 East Kendall St., a building owned by a joint venture made up of BioMed Realty and Prudential Real Estate Investors.
Meanwhile in June, drug giant Pfizer Inc. opened a 280,000-square-foot research center in Kendall Square that will work on therapies to expand the drug maker’s pipeline in rare diseases, inflammation, neuroscience, and cardiovascular diseases.
Those moves by Baxter and Pfizer were additional reasons for MPM to return to its Cambridge roots, Foley said.
As for BioMed Realty, it says Cambridge-Boston is its largest market as measured by square footage and rents. BioMed Realty owns and operates 19 life science properties in Cambridge and Boston, totaling approximately 3.3 million square feet of space, including the Center for Life Science | Boston building in the Longwood Medical Area.
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Transwestern | RBJ brokered the lease between BioMed and MPM Capital. The firm is the exclusive leasing agent for 450 Kendall St. Transwestern | RBJ’s Steven Purpura, managing partner and Northeast market leader, and Eric Smith, partner, represented BioMed Realty, while John Barry, partner, and Jeff Landers, assistant vice president, represented MPM Capital.
Chris Reidy can be reached at reidy@globe.com.