Merck KGaA Expands in Metro Boston

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Rendering of Merck KGaA’s new Burlington, Mass., campus

Boston—Global technology company Merck KGaA, of Darmstadt, Germany, will build a new 30-acre campus near Routes 3 and 128 in Burlington, Mass., that will serve as a hub for its North American life science business, the company announced Tuesday. The $115 million, five-story, 280,000-square-foot, LEED-certified building will include a customer collaboration laboratory, training center and office space. The project also includes an option to add a further 70,000 square feet later.

The project is to be built by the Gutierrez Co. of metro Boston, which will lease the property to Merck KGaA. Gutierrez did not respond to Commercial Property Executive’s request for additional information.

“This new and more expansive Merck campus gives us a unique, multi-use life science hub in the United States, one that provides our employees and customers with a sustainable and collaborative working environment,” Udit Batra, member of the Merck KGaA executive board & CEO of the company’s life science business, said in a prepared statement.

The campus is intended to serve as “a premier global customer destination,” as it will house both a customer service and call center and an M Lab Collaboration Center—a state-of-the-art, shared environment where Merck KGaA scientists and engineers work together with customers to tackle life science challenges.

The M Lab will be one of nine such centers worldwide; the others will be in Brazil, China, France, India, Singapore and South Korea.

The enhanced M Lab center in Burlington will replace the M Lab at the company’s Billerica, Mass., facility. The company’s 850 full-time life science employees in Billerica will relocate to the new campus when construction there is complete in the second half of 2017. Merck KGaA will maintain its other North American life science hub, in St. Louis.

The Billerica sites are leased and will be vacated after the Burlington project opens, a spokesperson for Merck KGaA unit MilliporeSigma told CPE.

(The company does not use the Merck name in the U.S. and Canada, where that name is used by American pharma company Merck & Co., aka Merck Sharp and Dohme or MSD, which has been independent since 1917.)