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Halda Therapeutics, a Branford-based biotech company founded by Yale professor Craig Crews, is returning to New Haven.
The drug discovery startup signed a lease on a 9,800 square foot lab and office space in Science Park, located just west of Yale’s Science Hill campus at the former Winchester Arms factory.
Halda recently completed a $25 million round of Series A financing.
The move was announced Wednesday in a press release from Winchester Partners, a joint venture of Twining Properties, L+M Development Partners and the Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, which owns the former factory, a 145,000 square-foot building at 115 Munson St.
Interviewed by phone on Thursday, Alex Twining, president and CEO of Twining Properties, said that “as [Halda] continued to grow, they wanted to be back in New Haven, where the action is.”
Twining said that future plans for Winchester Center could also include the four remaining buildings and four development sites in Science Park, up to 1,000 apartments and 500,000 square feet of office and lab space.
“Our vision is to make this a great mixed-use development, bringing together biotech companies with office and lab space with housing and restaurants,” Twining said. “Right now, it’s a lot of parking lots, and we’d like to fill those parking lots with residential and retail space to make it a more exciting place to live and work.”
Twining hopes that Halda’s move back to New Haven will help turn the city into a biotech hub.
“A lot of the work we do is in Kendall Square in Cambridge, which is the biotech capital of the planet,” Twining said. “The key driver there is the huge amount of research at Harvard and MIT, because having the best and brightest there has caused the market to become a global powerhouse. New Haven isn’t there yet, but some of the most pioneering work in that field is happening at Yale, so we see an opportunity to create a critical mass of biotech companies in New Haven.”
Halda plans to relocate to New Haven in the first quarter of 2021.
Banner image credit: Google Map Data, 2020