Sonoma Biotherapeutics on Monday hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony at its new research and development center and office space on Seattle’s waterfront.
The biotech company, which has a second location in South San Francisco, has taken over three of four floors in a building formerly occupied by the tech company F5, spanning a total of 83,000 square feet.
Sonoma launched in 2019 and is focused on treating autoimmune and inflammatory diseases in which a person’s immune system over-responds and attacks the wrong cells. It’s pursuing treatments that use what are known as regulatory T (Treg) cells to protect the cells under attack.
Sonoma has finished remodeling one of the floors of the building on Elliott Avenue, which will bring employees who had been spread between three locations in Seattle under one roof.
The new lab space is large enough for roughly 65 scientists, who are working on early-state research that precedes clinical trials. The research benches, incubators, centrifuges, fume hoods, microscopes, refrigerators and other scientific equipment fill bright, window-lined rooms with views that include Puget Sound. Other rooms house freezers and nitrogen-chilled tanks for cryostorage, and devices for sorting and analyzing cells.
The spaces are designed for flexibility. The lab benches can be moved as needed and electrical outlets are clustered on the ceiling, ready to accommodate new devices, said Steve Sample, senior director of facilities, on a Monday tour.
The other side of the floor has a shared space with dozens of desks as well as smaller glass-walled conference rooms and offices for employees and executives to use when they visit from California.
The team began designing the center in 2022, and construction started in the summer of 2023.
Sonoma’s move is a positive note in a slowed biotech sector. Vacancy rates for life science spaces have been rising in recent years in Western Washington, hitting somewhere between 13% and 17% in Seattle by the end of last year, according to reports by the real estate firms CBRE and JLL.
The center’s unfinished two floors eventually will be used for manufacturing and to support manufacturing, but the timing of that build out hasn’t been set. The company has started recruiting patients for two clinical trials: one treating people with rheumatoid arthritis and another for patients with hidradenitis suppurativa, a painful, chronic inflammatory skin condition.
The building’s fourth floor is not part of Sonoma’s lease and is unoccupied. The office is down the street from Expedia Group’s sprawling campus that opened in 2019. That same year, F5, the publicly traded networking and security company, moved into the F5 Tower in the heart of Seattle’s downtown.
One year ago, Sonoma announced a partnership with Regeneron to co-develop cell therapies for Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and two undisclosed conditions. As part of the deal, Sonoma received a $75 million upfront payment from Regeneron and there is potential for a $45 million milestone payment. The company has additionally raised $335 million in venture capital funding.
The company has more than 130 employees, roughly split between its Seattle and South San Francisco locations.
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