AstraZeneca PLC (NYSE: AZN) is leaving no doubt about its commitment to Montgomery County, pouring $300 million into a new U.S. manufacturing hub it’s establishing in Rockville just a couple months after taking over another building nearby.
The British pharmaceutical giant said Tuesday the facility at 9950 Medical Center Drive will start out as a space to make T-cell therapies for clinical trials in cancer, and it could support other disease areas and commercial work going forward. The company also said it expects to create more than 150 new jobs at the site.
The company will lease space in the nearly 85,000-square-foot building from Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. (NYSE: ARE), a California real estate investment trust specializing in life sciences.
“This new $300 million investment will accelerate our ambition to make next-generation cell therapy a reality, ensuring that we are ready to scale and meet the demands of patients,” Pam Cheng, AstraZeneca’s executive vice president of global operations and IT, and chief sustainability officer, said in a statement.
AstraZeneca stands to get some help funding the project. The Maryland Department of Commerce is “working to approve” a $500,000 conditional loan through its Advantage Maryland program, an AstraZeneca spokesperson told us, citing the governor’s office. In addition, Montgomery County plans to provide a $100,000 conditional grant via its Economic Development Fund Grant & Loan Program. The company is eligible for other incentives including the state’s job creation tax credit and the More Jobs for Marylanders program.
AstraZeneca’s Rockville building sits near Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center and multiple local biotech firms including Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (NYSE: EBS) and RegenxBio Inc. (NASDAQ: RGNX), which moved to its current headquarters, also part of Alexandria’s Rockville life sciences footprint, in 2021.
But AstraZeneca’s new facility has had a couple false starts as far as tenants go. London’s Autolus Therapeutics PLC (NASDAQ: AUTL) first leased the space under development in January 2019 for what would’ve been its U.S. headquarters and manufacturing hub, but the company subsequently changed its real estate plans. Autolus and Alexandria then terminated the lease in March 2021, at which point Alexandria signed a full-building lease with Boston-area cell therapy company TCR² Therapeutics Inc.
Then, in 2023, TCR² was acquired by Adaptimmune Therapeutics PLC (NADSAQ: ADAP), a cell therapy company with offices in Philadelphia and the U.K. — and its plans also changed as a result. So TCR² transferred its lease with Alexandria directly to AstraZeneca.
“This was a tremendous outcome for Alexandria to expand our strategic relationship with longtime, multi-region tenant AstraZeneca,” Larry Diamond, Alexandria Real Estate’s co-chief operating officer and regional market director for Maryland, told me in an email.
The building “will enable AstraZeneca to expand its manufacturing capabilities in Rockville while enhancing its ability to attract, retain, and inspire the best talent to advance its critical work to deliver lifesaving cell therapies,” Diamond said.
The facility is about three miles down Great Seneca Highway from AstraZeneca’s existing research and development campus, a nine-story facility spanning 1.27 million square feet. That site, one of the company’s five global R&D hubs, employs more than 4,300 people.
The company separately signed a lease in December for the full 198,000-square-foot building at 700 Progress Way in Gaithersburg. That building, set up to handle manufacturing and distribution, is part of a 44-acre campus off Interstate 270 between Montgomery Village Avenue and Watkins Mill Road.
AstraZeneca’s investment “will help maintain Maryland’s leadership in the industry and sharpen our competitive edge,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement.
The company counts nearly 30 sites across 16 countries, including some under development. It employs more than 2,600 people at its U.S. manufacturing facilities, which, it reports, are responsible for producing more than 9 billion doses of medicines each year.
AstraZeneca entered Greater Washington when it bought Gaithersburg-based MedImmune in 2007 for $15.6 billion. It retired the MedImmune brand in 2019, folding it into the larger business while reorganizing its R&D units — and maintaining MedImmune's former headquarters.
MedImmune played a significant role in helping build Montgomery County into a biotech hub, and many of its alumni went on to found or lead other life sciences companies.
They include Viela Bio Inc., a $250 million spinout that quickly went public, got its first drug through an FDA approval, and soon sold to Dublin’s Horizon Therapeutics PLC. West Coast pharma giant Amgen Inc. then acquired Horizon, putting it in Montgomery County — where Horizon has been developing an R&D campus of its own.
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