DALLAS — This article was originally published by our content partners at the Dallas Business Journal. You can read the original article here.
Pegasus Park has opened the doors to its new Bridge Labs facility, the latest piece of the puzzle to fall into place in the pursuit of making Dallas a biotechnology hub on the scale of Boston and San Francisco.
Co-developers Montgomery Street Partners and J. Small Investments cut the ribbon for Bridge Labs on Sept. 30. The facility, at 3000 Pegasus Park Dr. within the 26-acre Pegasus Park campus, consists of 135,000 square feet of new laboratory and office space to accommodate fast-growing biotech companies. Bridge Labs complements the existing 37,000-square-foot biotech startup incubator at BioLabs, which opened in 2022.
Bridge Labs consists of two existing and adjoining buildings that were renovated. Purpose-built shell laboratory space accommodates users up to 60,000 square feet, and pre-built lab suites range from 4,500 to 8,000 square feet. Layouts vary based on the different needs of the companies that take the space.
Perkins + Will is the architect and Swinerton is the contractor, with support from Project Management Advisors. JLL is the leasing agent.
Bridge Labs provides exactly what its name implies — it's intended to serve as a "bridge" for startups that have grown out of the incubator space but are not ready to occupy hundreds of thousands of square footage on their own just yet. Gabby Everett, director of business operations and strategy and site head for BioLabs Pegasus Park, describes the pre-built labs as "graduate suites" for startup companies.
"They're not ready to take the training wheels off just yet, so they still need to be a little bit closer to home, closer to the operational support that we provide for those companies, so that they can still focus on their science," Everett said in an interview with Dallas Business Journal. "But they're growing up in a bigger space. They're getting investment. They're bringing on new people, they're buying their own equipment.
Everett said during an August summit hosted by Bisnow about the life sciences ecosystem in Dallas that one company has already agreed to take 50,000 square feet at Bridge Labs.
An April 2023 filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation pegged the estimated construction cost for Bridge Labs at $32 million. The City of Dallas provided Pegasus Park with an economic incentives package totaling almost $8 million to assist with the project. The package consisted of a $3 million economic development grant and $4.77 million in property tax abatements over 10 years.
"Bridge Labs at Pegasus Park provides companies with the ability to grow their businesses, add members to their staff, and increase their footprint without having to leave the Pegasus Park campus," Steve Davis, president of J. Small Investments, said in a statement. "We are thankful to the City of Dallas, investors and all of our partners for the support in delivering this project to North Texas and growing our region’s rapidly-growing life sciences ecosystem."
The opening of Bridge Labs marks the latest chapter in Dallas' emergence as a life sciences hub, with Pegasus Park at the center of the action. A year ago, the federal government chose Texas as the headquarters for the "Customer Experience Hub" within the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which operates within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
A report by the Perryman Group, an economic and financial analysis firm estimated the operations of entities at Pegasus Park at full master-plan buildout will generate $1.9 billion in annual gross product and 15,180 jobs in the Dallas area.
Construction of Bridge Labs will generate nearly $105.5 million in estimated gross product and about 965 jobs.
“We are confident that Bridge Labs will continue to attract life sciences and healthcare companies and institutions to our region, resulting in additional intellectual capital, top-quality and high-paying technical jobs, and an increase in access to cutting-edge science," Sam Johnson, principal at Montgomery Street Partners, said in a statement.
J. Small Investments acquired the Pegasus Park campus, formerly owned by Exxon Mobil Corp., in September 2015 The firm partnered with Lyda Hill Philanthropies in July 2020 to turn the campus into a biotech, life sciences and nonprofit hub.
