By Dan Brendel – Staff Reporter, Washington Business Journal
United Therapeutics Corp. is teeing up major organ production facility at its Silver Spring biotech campus through a proposed land swap with Montgomery County.
The company (NASDAQ: UTHR), a longtime drugmaker of pulmonary hypertension therapies that in recent years has expanded into bioengineered organs, has agreed to trade several parcels it owns for a county-owned site on 3.8 acres adjacent to its headquarters at 1000 Spring St.
The site, now home to a parking garage and other county operations, could yield up to 831,000 square feet under existing zoning.
United Therapeutics hasn't yet determined exactly how many buildings or square feet it would build there, and UT didn't provide a estimated timeline for development. The company's existing headquarters building totals 415,000 square feet.
The envisioned new facility represents “a fairly significant expansion of our employment footprint in Silver Spring,” a “multiple” of the 230 employees currently there, Dewey Steadman, the firm’s head of investor relations, told me in a joint interview with other company and county representatives.
“Ultimately, what it does for UT is it provides us with a runway to bring that vision of commercial-scale organ production to Silver Spring,” Thomas Kaufman, a United Therapeutics executive overseeing corporate real estate, said in the interview.
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