UCLA's New Research Center Could Be The Biotech Boost The LA Area Needs

The Wednesday announcement that the University of California, Los Angeles' purchase of the former Westside Pavilion mall would result in the creation of a new biotech hub is generating excitement about how the city's life sciences industry could take off as a result of the development.

“This is a very big deal,” Dan Gober, executive director for Los Angeles at the industry group Biocom California, told Bisnow. 

The deal is worth $700M, $500M of which comes from the state of California, and brings the 587K SF mall-turned-office property under the purview of UCLA, which will establish two research centers there.

The existing UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering as well as the newly created California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy at UCLA will both operate out of the space, now called One Westside.

A new space like the one envisioned, associated with an institution like UCLA, gives Gober reason to believe that companies might start to gravitate to LA to have access to a specific type of talent and level of technology.

The research center could act as a magnet to draw more research dollars to the region, HATCHspaces co-founder Allan Glass told Bisnow. HATCHspaces, a real estate developer that focuses on life sciences facilities, has a project less than one mile from the future UCLA research center. 

Glass also sees the potential of the area to become a hub because of the effort the city of Los Angeles has put into ensuring areas along the Expo Line, now the E Line, transit corridor could host dense commercial development and become job creation hubs.

This new UCLA center’s location, a short walk from the E Line’s Westwood/Rancho Park station, “could really contribute to that entire Expo corridor becoming the center of the biotech world in Southern California,” Glass said. 

Life sciences real estate, like many other sectors of commercial real estate, had a difficult 2023, with sales volumes dropping and firms pumping the brakes on expansions as venture capital slowed.

But even in banner years, Los Angeles is not traditionally considered a top contender in the broader life sciences market. Those positions have long been reserved for Boston, San Francisco and San Diego.

However, LA is often included on lists of rising markets or up-and-coming hubs. A Q3 life sciences report from CBRE found 26 tenants seeking more than 740K SF of space in the LA market, with only around 420K SF under construction. 

Office-to-lab conversions, some of which will likely be needed at the facility, are notoriously challenging and expensive due to the highly specialized needs for various types of research and technical work. 

But it's still quicker than building new.

To find a unique building that allows for all the necessary elements to be put into it is significant and rare, especially at this scale, Glass said. Finding it and being able to retrofit it to meet UCLA’s needs as opposed to trying to build something like this from the ground up is likely to shave years off the project's timeline, Glass estimated.