Everett's Old Pfizer Site Gets a New Life

A big building in south Everett that once was meant for Pfizer's drug making has a new owner. Breakthrough Properties, a firm that focuses on life-science real estate, bought the 215 Shuksan Way campus for seventy-eight million dollars. They also signed a long lease with a mystery biopharma company that will run a U.S. manufacturing site there.

Back in 2022, Seagen, a Bothell biotech that Pfizer later bought, announced plans to turn the site into a place for making medicines for trials and regular sales. When Pfizer decided to stop the construction, they said the roughly one hundred twenty workers on the job would be affected, though they did not confirm layoffs. Pfizer stressed that the move was about capacity, not about employee performance.

The campus spans 270,000 square feet and is set up for full-scale drug production. It includes labs for quality control, office areas, a cafe, and space for warehousing and shipping. The lease runs for twenty-one years, giving the tenant plenty of time to develop the facility.

Breakthrough Properties used money from its second life-science fund to make the purchase. The deal fits with the company's push to boost U.S. biomanufacturing as big drug makers like Eli Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Roche pledge around five hundred billion dollars for domestic supply chains, according to a Reuters report from August 2024.