Fresh off a clinical trial milestone for its lead gene-therapy candidate, Kestrel Biologics says it is running out of room at its Foundry Row headquarters and is now searching for a site for a dedicated manufacturing facility.
Kestrel Biologics has begun formally scouting sites for a second manufacturing facility, Chief Executive Elena Marchetti confirmed this week, a decision the company said was accelerated by last month’s news that its lead gene-therapy candidate had cleared its first clinical trial milestone. The company has outgrown the lab and manufacturing space it leases at Forge Bellwater’s Foundry Row incubator and says it needs a dedicated production facility within the next two years.
“We have known for a while that Foundry Row can’t hold everything we’re trying to build,” Marchetti said. “The trial result is what turned a maybe into a timeline.”
A short list, with West Bellwater in the running
Marchetti declined to name every site under consideration but confirmed the company is evaluating parcels in West Bellwater, where an industrial park expansion is currently seeking state financing, alongside at least one site closer to downtown. The West Bellwater industrial park expansion, which has drawn interest from several manufacturers, would put Kestrel’s new facility roughly five miles from its Foundry Row headquarters and near the community college’s second campus.
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, said she has fielded calls from Kestrel’s real estate team over the past two months. “They’re looking at what everybody in this cluster is looking at right now, which is whether there’s enough industrial-zoned land near enough to Foundry Row that they don’t lose people on the commute,” Nakamura said.
Foundry Row’s biotech cluster is running out of room
The search reflects a broader space constraint facing Foundry Row’s biotech tenants, detailed in a recent Times report on the neighborhood’s lab space crunch. Kestrel currently leases roughly 34,000 square feet at Forge Bellwater, split between office space, research labs and a small pilot manufacturing line, all of which Marchetti said is now running near capacity.
We could probably squeeze another eighteen months out of what we have if we got creative with shift scheduling. That is not a real plan for a company trying to double its workforce.
Elena Marchetti, Chief Executive, Kestrel Biologics
Marchetti said the new facility would primarily house manufacturing and quality-control operations, freeing the Foundry Row space for research and administrative functions. She estimated the facility would ultimately employ 60 to 90 workers, a subset of the roughly 150 new hires the company has said it plans to add under its current funding round.
Dr. Samuel Iyer, a labor economist at Bellwater State University who studies the region’s manufacturing transition, said Kestrel’s search illustrates a pattern he has watched develop across the metro area’s green-energy and biotech firms. “The industrial land that used to sit empty because factory work had left is suddenly valuable again, just for a different kind of factory work,” Iyer said. “The question is whether the workforce is ready for it, and whether the sites even have the right utilities and zoning without a fight.”
Nakamura said she expects Kestrel’s decision, whenever it comes, to influence how other biotech and manufacturing employers think about expansion sites in the metro area. “If Kestrel picks West Bellwater, that tells every other company we’re courting that West Bellwater is now a real option and not just cheaper land,” she said. “If they pick somewhere closer to downtown, that tells a different story about what companies are willing to pay to keep everybody in one neighborhood.”
Marchetti said the company hopes to announce a site within the next two quarters and to break ground within the year, though she cautioned that permitting and zoning reviews could push the timeline. She said the company has not ruled out sites outside the Bellwater metro area entirely, though she called that outcome unlikely given the company’s ties to Kincaid’s research pipeline and its existing local workforce.
“Our science comes out of a lab three miles from here,” Marchetti said. “It would take a lot for us to walk away from that just to save money on a building.”
Whichever site Kestrel chooses, Marchetti said the company plans to keep its research and administrative headquarters at Forge Bellwater, calling the incubator “the reason we exist in the first place” and pointing to the density of other biotech tenants there as a recruiting advantage the company does not want to give up.
Iyer said the decision will also be watched closely by officials weighing how to zone remaining industrial land across the metro area. “Every one of these facility searches is really a referendum on whether we planned enough industrial-zoned, utility-ready land for the next wave of manufacturers,” he said. “Bellwater spent two decades with more of that land than it needed. That may not be true much longer.”
Nakamura said the chamber has offered to help coordinate site visits and introduce Kestrel’s real estate team to workforce-training partners near each location under consideration, an effort she said reflects how much the city’s broader economic-development strategy now depends on decisions made inside a handful of growing biotech companies.