Building On Gateway's Success
Warren Buffet famously advised investors to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” We would argue that now, when fear abounds, is the time for Central Massachusetts, and the folks who want to make Worcester the center of the life sciences universe in particular, to get greedy.
The fact that RXi Pharmaceuticals has extended its lease at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center at Gateway Park in Worcester through August 2011 should touch off an all-out blitz on the part of WPI and its partner in the Gateway Park project, the Worcester Business Development Corp., and of the state agencies that have the wherewithal to help round up tenants for such projects and the connections to get more tenants to sign leases there.
Committed To Worcester
RXi could’ve left the city at any time in its short history for someplace more glamorous or more easily recognizable.
Cambridge and Boston would’ve simply been the easy options. Instead, the company has shown increasing commitment to Worcester in recent months by hiring more staff, expanding from 6,200 square feet to slightly more than 7,000 at Gateway Park and re-upping its lease there for two additional years.
That’s at least two more years of touting RXi, its co-founder — UMass Medical School professor and Nobel Prize winner Craig Mello — his pioneering work that could change the very nature of the pharmaceutical industry, and the fact that the company is growing and choosing to grow in Worcester.
If Gateway Park and Worcester are good enough for RXi, they’re good enough for anyone.
WPI and the WBDC should spend the next two years aggressively recruiting new tenants for Gateway’s existing 120,000-square-foot building and the nearly 400,000 square feet of laboratory and research space they’ve yet to build there.
Of any current or prospective development in Central Massachusetts, we feel Gateway Park, through its association with RXi, its connection to WPI and the prospect that company upon cutting-edge company could be spun out of it, has the most promise.
And judging by recent efforts and pronouncements by Massachusetts Life Sciences Center President and CEO Susan Windham-Bannister and new Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Gregory Bialecki, WPI and the WBDC will have state help available to them in those efforts.
Windham-Bannister, while on an admirably opportunistic trip to California with Gov. Deval Patrick, told the WBJ that the venture capital firms and start-ups she was meeting with there were keen to learn more, not just about Massachusetts, but Central Massachusetts, as a place for investment and manufacturing.
A spokesman for Bialecki told the WBJ recently that the new secretary “really wants to focus on that area of the state.”
So, in addition to approaching prospective tenants for Gateway Park and saying, “it’s good enough for RXi and its Nobel Prize-winning co-founder, and it’ll be perfect for you,” the folks at WPI and the WBDC should also approach Windham-Bannister and Bialecki and ask in no uncertain terms for help getting the development fully built out and occupied.
Windham-Bannister knows first-hand that California’s crumbling economy and $16 billion state budget shortfall spell opportunity for Massachusetts and she holds the purse strings on the state fund that can make the relocation of a California firm to Worcester a more attractive deal.
This is not a time for modesty, or for the folks at Gateway Park to sit by and wait for new tenants or new investment to come to them.
We’re tremendously proud to have RXi in Worcester and we’re certain that more than just a few life sciences and engineering companies would be proud to be associated with the company by joining them here in the heart of the Commonwealth, even if it is only through residence in the same building.
WBJ Web Partners
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