The life sciences company Amgen celebrated Thursday in Kendall Square, marking a 25th anniversary in Cambridge’s innovation district – its 285,000-square-foot research center opened in 2001 – and company, local and state officials took the chance to look ahead as well as back.
That includes names such as Anthropic, Akamai, AstraZeneca, Biogen, Dynamic Creatures, Lila Sciences, Takeda, Zealand Pharma and Aretian that officials are taking as good news for Kendall Square and outlying areas such as Alewife.
Between a party with mingling, games, cake and a hot chocolate and apple cider bar (as well as a lunch with foods fancy or fun) came a speaking program in which Amgen employees and executives reminisced about the company’s growth and politicians marveled at what Kendall Square has become. “There were a lot of parking lots,” said mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, remembering the much different square of her childhood. “Now to see what we have, it’s truly, truly remarkable.”
Amgen, founded around 45 years ago in Thousand Oaks, California, is a $37 billion company making medicines with a staff of 31,500 employees in around 100 countries. Its first offices in Cambridge were in the Alewife area as it waited for its Kendall Square headquarters to be built, speakers said.
After move-in, “not every floor of the building was used, and even in the floors that were being used, not every area was being used. We decided to put a proposal in front of the CEO and staff to say how great it would be to build the fastest developing group in Massachusetts in Cambridge,” said Sam Guhan, senior vice president of global engineering for the company.
Leader Margaret Faul started work for Amgen here in 2003 but spent the bulk of her years in California. “Returning years later in 2023, I could see how much the team and [Amgen Massachusetts] have grown. Since becoming the site head, I’ve seen how that growth reflects a bigger idea, and innovation does live here.”
More than 450 employees work for Amgen in Cambridge in support of products such as Enbrel, for autoimmune diseases, Blincyto, a leukemia therapy, Repatha, which treats cholesterol, and Evenity and Prolia for osteoporosis.
“The work that’s being done in Amgen in places like this have real-world consequences for family members and patients,” said state senator Sal DiDomenico, another Cambridge politician who grew up nearby and saw Kendall Square develop – and who saw something personal in its growth because his mother died from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. “You give time to families that don’t always have the time to give. You extend their lives. You make their lives better. You turn chronic diseases into cures, and you turn fatal diseases into chronic diseases, and that gives everybody more time with the loved ones. All the numbers and all the data and research that is being compiled has a face.”
The company was also credited buy officials as being a good community partner, with Siddiqui calling out its partnerships with nonprofits such as the Science Club for Girls and Breakthrough Greater Boston in Cambridge. DiDomenico agreed: “There are a lot of companies that say they support the community, a lot of companies that profess to be a good community partner. I don’t see a lot of logos on things – but I see the Amgen logo in a lot of places.”
Looking ahead in the life sciences
Kendall Square’s growth was boosted by a landmark city ordinance in 1977 that welcomed recombinant DNA ordinance while establishing safeguards “that allowed scientific innovation to advance while protecting health,” Siddiqui noted. The square has been powered, though, by its proximity to MIT and Harvard and their own cultures of innovation and startups. Kendall Square Association executive director Beth O’Neill Maloney recalled that when she arrived four years ago, vacancy rates in her domain were famously at zero – there was no room in the square for businesses to move into.
A suffering economy, years of hostility to science and disinvestment from the federal government under Donald Trump has changed things. There’s a 20 percent vacancy rates in Kendall Square and East Cambridge, according to Bisnow and other market analysts. (“We’ll see how the election turns out,” Maloney said.)
“There’s an opportunity for people to come here, grow here,” Maloney said, and that is now happening again. “There’s a lot of other innovation happening here around climate tech, blue tech, green tech, nuclear fusion, quantum – quantum is huge, and it’s going to be a really exciting space over the next several years.”
The AI company Anthropic signed a lease last week for 24,000 square feet in Kendall and announced an $11.6 billion contract with Akamai that Maloney said was just one sign of renewed growth.
AstraZeneca announced on Oct. 5 its expansion in Cambridge with the opening of a 2,000-employee, 570,000-square-foot, 18-story research and development center at 290 Binney St. Biogen said in March that as of in 2028 – its 50th anniversary – it is moving its global headquarters into 585,000 square feet at 75 Broadway St., a new MIT building. David Maher, chief executive and president of the Chamber of Commerce in Cambridge, said both were exciting developments in “a challenging time for business with a lot of vacancy.”
Takeda’s new building at 585 Kendall is more news “we can point to and say, oh, those are great, but when people consolidate in those buildings it’s going to leave behind a lot of vacancy, and that’s the challenge – how you backfill that,” Maher said.
Yet even there was some good news, Maher said, in the arrival of Zealand Pharma, a Dutch company that chose Cambridge’s Alewife neighborhood for its first U.S. outpost. That’s a vote of confidence for that area, along with word that AI company Lila Sciences has leased 78 percent of Phase 1 at the IQHQ development being referred to as Alewife Park.
Outside the life sciences, the robotics company Dynamic Creatures – spun out of Boston Dynamics – has taken space in Cambridge to ramp up design and production for hospitality industry animatronics, Maher said. It’s a potentially more cuddly side of the Waltham parent company, which took a PR hit last month with news that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was planning to spend up to $2 million on its robot “dogs.”
Speaking after the formal presentations Thursday as the party was revving up, Faul seemed pleased by the consolidation around Kendall and comfortable with the trends around it, including the coming of AI companies as a secondary sector in the area.
“Life sciences rotate. There’s points in which the startups kind of grow and then ebb and slow in terms of how successful they are. People know about being here in Cambridge. The community connection with other pharmaceutical companies, with academic institutions, with hospitals – it’s a real big drive to have companies come to this area,” Faul said.
Faul wasn’t convinced the past couple of years of political payback had damaged Kendall Square in the long term, or that life sciences were recoalescing in places such Northern California – because all the hot spots had been hit equally. “We’re all in the same place. The Bay Area is continuing to to grow, but they’ve had their ebbs and flows too,” Faul said. “It’s been a bit of a blip, maybe, but I do feel that the community is coming back and and and growing.”
A new Kendall Square Association member, the Aretian research firm, has released a report on “An Urban Vision for Boston’s Innovation Ecosystem” and talks about it at 2 p.m. Oct. 23 at The Foundry community building, Maloney said. “If you’re looking at growth, that’d be a great place to look,” she said.
