As part of a bid to consolidate its footprint in Massachusetts, Biogen is foregoing its old home base to put down new roots in Cambridge. That said, the company won’t be moving far from its current digs in Kendall Square.
Biogen on Monday said it signed a 15-year lease for a building at Cambridge’s Kendall Common that the company plans to use as its new global headquarters. The Big Biotech says it will move its current Cambridge-based employees to the site at the time of its expected opening in 2028, which will coincide with Biogen’s 50th anniversary.
The company says the decision forms part of a multiyear plan to optimize, modernize and consolidate its real estate footprint in Massachusetts.
The building Biogen is leasing—located at 75 Broadway in Cambridge and representing some 580,000 square feet of office, research and development space—is part of Kendall Common, a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology-backed development project looking to set up residential, business and commercial space with easy access to both the school and the renowned biotech cluster Kendall Square.
Biogen’s lease was signed with a new joint venture between the MIT Investment Management Company and BioMed Realty, which is part of Blackstone Real Estate, the company explained in a press release.
Biogen figures the move will “centralize” its presence in Kendall Square and help wed its R&D and technical operations team with the company’s commercial forces at a “co-located innovation hub.”
As the lone corporate tenant at the new building, Biogen says it will install “laboratories of the future, upgraded workspaces, and modern amenities,” along with eco-friendly design elements.
The building will also host the Biogen CoLab, which the company describes as a classroom-style community laboratory and community space that will cater to Biogen scientists, nonprofits and schools as a gateway to the life sciences and healthcare industries.
“Nearly 50 years after first putting down roots in Kendall Square, Biogen is embarking on a new chapter in the very heart of the community that has shaped our success,” Chris Viehbacher, Biogen’s CEO, said in a statement. “Our new space will support the advancement of our pipeline of breakthrough medicines by bringing our employees together and fostering collaboration with leading scientific minds, key partners, and top talent.”
Biogen has had an outsized presence in Cambridge for most of its history, and its current workers there won’t have to move far when the company opens its new headquarters in 2028, as the Kendall Common building is roughly a five-minute walk from Biogen’s current corporate HQ on Binney Street.
This comes amid a time of cutbacks for Biogen, which began the year with layoffs across its research team—which themselves came off the back of major cuts announced in 2023 that saw the biopharma ax around 11% of its workforce, a process that finished at the start of 2025.
While Biogen has long stuck close to the Boston-area suburb, the company briefly moved its base of operations over to Weston, Massachusetts, in 2010. Still, the relocation wasn’t fated to last, with Biogen announcing intentions to move back to Cambridge the following year and ultimately doing so in 2013.
On the commercial front, Biogen is presently pushing four recent drug launches to help offset a downturn in the company’s lucrative-yet-fading multiple sclerosis business. After pulling down $9.7 billion in total sales last year, Biogen says it expects 2025 revenue to fall by a mid-single-digit percentage point.