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March 30, 2021

Biohaven opens second office in suburban Philly

IMAGE | Courtesy Norwood Construction
By Natalie Missakian

New Haven’s Biohaven Pharmaceuticals has quietly opened a second office outside Philadelphia to expand its commercial operation following its launch of a new migraine drug last year.

Biohaven confirmed to New Haven Biz that it opened the 21,000-square-foot Yardley, Pa. location to “serve as a centralized area for employees that live in the Pennsylvania to [New Jersey] corridor.”

New Haven architecture firm Svigals + Partners recently announced its role in designing the two-story location on its website, saying the recently refurbished space includes offices and a sales training center. 

Biohaven began leasing the location in March 2020, according to a recent regulatory filing, but it became fully operational during the third quarter of last year, the company said Monday. 

Although Biohaven would not say how many of its 825 employees are working at the Pennsylvania location or in New Haven, the company stressed that no positions are being reduced or moved out of the Elm City.

“The New Haven office remains our U.S. headquarters,” Biohaven said in a written statement. 

The new office is housed in a recently modernized suburban office campus known as Makefield Crossing, about a 40-minute drive from Philadelphia and 15 minutes from Trenton, N.J. 

Biohaven declined to specify what categories of employees would be working out of the new location, but the Svigals announcement describes it as a “second major workplace” and says it serves “a highly mobile workforce as part of the company’s expansion into the mid-Atlantic area.”

CEO Vlad Coric told New Haven Biz in February 2020 that the company had assembled a 500-person nationwide sales force to market its newly approved migraine drug, Nurtec ODT.

In designing the latest office, Svigals said it incorporated many of the same elements it used in the build out of Biohaven’s downtown New Haven headquarters at 215 Church St. Biohaven purchased the landmark early 1900s brick bank building in 2018.

“Both locations preview what many believe to be the workplace of the future – where a large percentage of users work both remotely and in the office, primarily to meet and collaborate with others,” Svigals said.

Biohaven, which develops drugs to treat neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions, signed a seven-year lease for the new space, with an option for a five-year extension, according to a regulatory filing.

The growing seven-year-old Yale spinout also expanded its New Haven footprint by 10,000 square feet earlier this year, the result of its recent acquisition of Kleo Pharmaceuticals. 

The publicly-traded company opened Biohaven Labs, an integrated chemistry and discovery research arm, in Kleo’s former Science Park laboratory in January and absorbed Kleo’s chemistry and drug discovery team.

Although Biohaven did not elaborate on its reasons for choosing to expand in the Philadelphia region, the city has earned a national reputation as a growing life sciences hub. 

In 2018, another Elm City biotech, Achillion Pharmaceuticals, moved its corporate headquarters to the Philly suburb of Blue Bell, Pa., citing the region’s talent pool and its access to major airports. Achillion was acquired by New Haven-born Alexion Pharmaceuticals in 2020.

Contact Natalie Missakian at news@newhavenbiz.com

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