Vaccine-Chasing Biotech Snaps Up Space At Dropbox’s Mission Bay HQ

San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, home to the University of California San Francisco, a leader in medical research, is set to gain yet another biotech company, adding to its long-standing reputation as a major life sciences hub.

Vir Biotechnology agreed in December to sublease 133,896 SF from Dropbox Inc. at its headquarters at 1800 Owens St., the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Dropbox's headquarters, known as The Exchange, is owned by Kilroy Realty Corp., which leased 100% of the property’s four interconnected buildings, totaling 750K SF, to Dropbox. In November, the San Francisco Business Times reported that Dropbox’s listing of nearly 472K SF at The Exchange marked the biggest lease deal in the city at that time.

That SEC filing says that the biotech company began a sublease term for a combination of lab and office space on Dec. 24 that will terminate on Aug. 30, 2033, with no options for extension. The company paid Dropbox $500K upfront ahead of its base rental payment of $47.44 per SF that will be made beginning in 2022. The SEC filing also states that Vir Biotechnology will get up to $10.5M in a tenant improvement allowance. 

Vir Biotech, also headquartered in Mission Bay at 499 Illinois St., announced in a December press release that it will be working with GlaxoSmithKline on a therapeutic intervention trial against COVID-19. The work is part of a public-private partnership with the National Institutes of Health’s Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines Phase 3 trial to assess a treatment against COVID-19 known as VIR-7831.