Lab Move Client – Solid Biosciences
Lab Move Location – One Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA
Lab Move Destination – 500 Rutherford Avenue, Charlestown, MA
Lab Move Timetable – Spring 2022 – August 2022
Solid Biosciences is a life science company focused on advancing a portfolio of neuromuscular and cardiac programs. Solid Biosciences retained the services of Brookline Transportation Company’s lab relocation division, Labmovers.com, to move two of the company’s labs and one office from One Kendall Square in Cambridge—a total of 20,000 square feet—to new space at 500 Rutherford Avenue in Charlestown. That was the site for the former Hood plant.
The move would involve the relocation of nearly 1,000 assets, including specimens. The dollar value of all the assets being moved was about $1 million. The move also involved the relocation of $40 million in equipment and machinery, as well as $1 million in cold chain material that required plug-in service.
The move faced a number of challenges. One specifically being the progress of the buildout at the new location. Due to supply chain issues, the move was delayed. So, the relocation would take place in waves over a period of time.
Additional delays found Solid Biosciences having to be out of One Kendall Square with the buildout at 500 Rutherford Avenue not yet completed.
These types of challenges up the ante on an ordinary laboratory/office move. When it involves the relocation of specimens that need to be kept at specific temperatures—in this case, 4 degrees storage, minus 20 and minus 80—the challenge takes on a life of its own.
Contingency plans
The possibility of delays requiring a plan B to store the contents from One Kendall Square was always a possibility. Our contingency plan was to use one of our refrigerated trailers at BTI HQ in Hanover. The truck has a generator for back-up and was hardwired to shore power. It also has a wireless reporting system that we used to enable us to safely store specimens with 24-hour monitoring, until it was move-in time at 500 Rutherford.
Another challenge involved construction work at One Kendall Square that made the freight elevator unavailable for three weeks. We moved as much as possible with the passenger elevator, including some of the aforementioned freezers, which weighed up to 2,000 pounds.
Then move-in day arrived and…
Solid Biosciences sublet some of their lab space at 500 Rutherford Avenue to a small firm. When it came time to move Solid Biosciences into the space at the end of August 2022, we had to move the other lab’s equipment out of the way, along with removing and reinstalling glass doors and One Kendall Square.
What the move involved
The move itself was intricate. For the specimens, we utilized our BTI’s plug-in service to maintain the temperatures, with a backup plan in place. The move also involved packing, crating and transporting specialized equipment such as biosafety cabinets, bio reactors, mass spectrometer and all bench equipment.
Due to supply chain issues, some of the vendors for the specialized equipment could not provide the padded crating. BTI utilized our resources to create customized crates with padding to safely transport those items.
BTI successfully completed this intricate, always evolving move, during the last week of August 2022.
Bryan Carr, senior project manager, Solid Biosciences
“Essentially, we moved three different facilities, two labs and one office, which previously took up 20,000 square feet, into a 42,000 square foot space in Charlestown. In addition to just the challenge of that alone, BTI had to navigate work around construction at One Kendall Square, a mixture of union and non-union labor, permitting issues that required moving specimens with a value of up to $1 million to the BTI facility in Hanover, Mass.,” said Bryan Carr, senior project manager at Solid Biosciences. “George and the entire BTI team rolled with all of those changes and were able to move 980 lab assets without anything broken or damaged.”
