Pitt gets $100M infusion to build biomanufacturing hub at Hazelwood Green brownfield site

Pittsburgh’s last brownfield-turned-tech hub just got another $100 million infusion.

The Richard King Mellon Foundation announced Wednesday that it’s gifting the money to the University of Pittsburgh to develop a large swath of the 178-acre Hazelwood Green development along the Monongahela River into a biomanufacturing powerhouse.

The $100 million grant — the largest ever donated by the foundation for a single project — will provide the capital and some initial operating expenses for the site’s newest anchor tenant: Pitt’s planned commercial bioresearch and development facility named BioForge.

“The foundation is making a historic bet on Pittsburgh to lead nationally in the life sciences,” said Sam Reiman, director of the Richard King Mellon Foundation. “If covid-19 taught us anything, it’s that we need to discover and manufacture health care advances right here at home.”

Foundation leaders anticipate that BioForge — and the downstream and related jobs it helps create — will jump-start the burgeoning life sciences sector in the region. It plans to develop products related to gene and engineered cell therapy, micro- and nano-antibodies, microneedle and other novel therapeutics.

“Pittsburgh is poised to become the next global hub for life sciences and biotech, and this gift propels us on that path like never before,” said Dr. Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and dean of Pitt’s School of Medicine.

Plans for BioForge include building out 200,000 to 250,000 square feet of space at Hazelwood Green, “with the purpose of bringing every stage of the life sciences innovation process under one roof.”

“It really centers around the idea that modern medical research is leading to new types of therapies for a wide range of diseases, and moving away from chemicals and towards biological things,” University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Patrick Gallagher said. “That type of therapy requires a couple of things. One is access to the research talents to produce those and modify them, and it also requires access to state-of-the-art specialty hospitals.”

Leslie Davis, CEO of Downtown Pittsburgh-headquartered UPMC, said that the 40-hospital system is “looking forward to offering our bench-to-bedside expertise and unique clinical perspectives to continue developing new technologies and novel treatments that will revolutionize medical care.”

The revitalization of Hazelwood Green has been in the works for nearly two decades. The property once housed a coke works and rolling mill first operated by Jones & Laughlin and later LTV steel. The mills closed in 1998.

In 2002, four local foundations — R.K. Mellon, Benedum, McCune and The Heinz Endowments — joined forces to buy the property as Almono LP (an acronym for Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers). In 2016, McCune sold its stake to R.K. Mellon.

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“It took some vision and the ability to take risks to protect those assets,” said Gallagher. “And now we are in the unique position for an urban university to have prime real estate — exploiting the natural concentration of hospitals and research facilities in Oakland to basically see them grow a commercial sector in a vibrant, green, attractive and community-centered location that’s so desirable to modern companies.”

The university president pointed out that too often, cities around the country undervalue riverfront properties and turn former industrial sites into the likes of tow yards, parking lots and landfills — or developments like the Waterfront shopping area in Homestead that neglect to benefit the surrounding community.

“This kind of is a last-mile project — incredibly visible and impactful and it has the potential to ignite the commercial side of this — but it really would not have been possible without that long staying power,” Gallagher said. “What a shame if we had not had the foundations taking that long view and embracing that vision.”

BioForge’s goal is to develop and bring commercially viable products to market — such as emerging cellular therapies for cancer patients — in addition to spurring ripple-effect jobs by supporting bioresearch startups and accelerating biomanufacturing breakthroughs.

“What this grant allows basically is the risk-taking to build an anchor biomanufacturing facility that we called BioForge – a nod to our future and our past – and to produce a wide range of biological therapeutics,” Gallagher said. “Any company wanting to produce these (therapeutics) commercially wants to be near all three of these things – the research environment, the clinical environment and the production capabilities.”

By partnering with clinicians from UPMC and private industry leaders, the facility will provide high-tech manufacturing capabilities, experimental “wet lab” and other space for innovations and incubating fledgling companies.

“While Pittsburgh is a rockstar in spinouts and creating new companies from our universities, we have not seen a lot of those companies scaling up with great success,” Gallagher said. “The conditions for those companies becoming high-growth companies have been less favorable here. This is fairly new technology. We’re kind of in the pre-dot-com era when it comes to the life sciences.”

Gallagher said he’s hopeful that BioForge “has the effect of creating much better conditions for companies here to grow” and even incentivize some based elsewhere to relocate to the Pittsburgh area.

“This is one of the final puzzle pieces in our efforts to make Hazelwood Green truly different than other riverside developments,” Reiman said. “This project will help make our vision for Hazelwood Green come to life.”

Pitt’s BioForge funding announcement follows the R.K. Mellon Foundation’s $75 million gift earlier this year to Carnegie Mellon University to develop its robotics hub at the Hazelwood Green site. The 150,000-square-foot Robotics Innovation Center is set for completion by the 2025-26 academic year. The center will accelerate the work of CMU’s Manufacturing Futures Institute, now on the site in Mill 19.

Gallagher said that both universities are using their respective strengths and working together to make the overall project a success for the region.

Like CMU, Pitt officials said they hope to use their Hazelwood Green facility and its staff to engage with local K-12 schools, community colleges and workforce training initiatives.

“This is a key chapter in a long book of support from the R.K. Mellon Foundation,” said Gallagher, noting the gift is among the largest ever received by the university in its 234-year history.

The Hazelwood Green grants are part of the R.K.Mellon Foundation’s plan to invest $1.2 billion in the region over the next decade.

“Our trustees approved this extraordinary grant because of this project’s unique potential to powerfully accelerate several of our most important strategic priorities,” said Richard A. Mellon, chairman of the Richard King Mellon Foundation Board of Trustees. “We are convinced this project is a generational opportunity to create shared prosperity at scale for the people of southwestern Pennsylvania, and to cement Pittsburgh’s status as a national and global leader in one of the most important economic sectors of our time.”

The foundation, which dates to 1947, has played a significant role in the region’s development. It has underwritten everything from Pittsburgh’s original emergence from its status as the Smoky City in the 1950s to recent efforts to meet community needs during the pandemic shutdown.

In addition to being the region’s largest, the R.K. Mellon Foundation is one of the Top 50 in the world, according to ARCO. It ended 2020 with a $3.1 billion endowment after disbursing $130 million in grants and other regional investments.

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