The Vivarium Problem

Shared office space is easy. Shared wet lab space is harder. Shared regulated space, the kind that houses animal research under GxP standards or manufactures cell and gene therapies under cGMP, is the hardest infrastructure problem I have worked on. It is also where the model mattered most.

The reason is that regulated facilities carry requirements most companies cannot meet alone and cannot afford to build for a single program. A vivarium has its own architecture, air handling, waste streams, monitoring, and staffing, all of it inspected. We expanded our Vivarium Program into Kendall Square because early stage teams needed compliant animal research capacity and had nowhere to get it at their scale. Pooling it was the only way to make it reachable for a company that was not yet large enough to justify its own.

We pushed the same logic further into the most demanding categories. We announced the launch and immediate sell out of GxP compliant animal research and manufacturing facilities, which told us the demand was real and underserved. And we set out to build what we described as the world's largest multi modality, multi product cGMP center for cell and gene therapies, in South San Francisco, on the back of our national expansion that began with our first California location.

What makes this work hard is that none of it tolerates shortcuts. A shared model only earns trust in regulated space if the operations are genuinely better than what each tenant could run on its own, not merely cheaper. The compliance has to be real, the documentation has to be airtight, and the team has to know more about running these rooms than any single client does. The shared part is the business model. The standards are not negotiable.

I am proud of this part of the work precisely because it was unglamorous and unforgiving. Anyone can put desks in a room. Building regulated infrastructure that multiple companies can rely on, and that holds up to inspection, is a different kind of engineering. It is also where the promise of shared infrastructure either proves itself or falls apart. Ours proved itself.