Courtship controversy

The blood center’s desire to expand is now vertically expanded—in the form of a $750 million proposal with Boston developer Longfellow, turning it into Upper East Side Research Facility Enter a 16-story life science center. The blood center will occupy about one-third of the tower, and Longfellow will pay for the construction in exchange. Rent remaining space Academic and start-up companies in the field of life sciences.

If their rezoning application prevails, it will despite Neighbors strongly opposed And local elected officials, including city councillor Ben Kallos, who mocked this as a trick to “print money”.

“I have never seen a project so hostile to elected officials like this,” Carlos told Crain’s in May.

City lobby records show that since 2019, the center has spent approximately US$1 million to develop and promote the proposal.

Former employees said the center’s ambition to extract more products from its premises has been around for decades. Richard Bonomo is a former center researcher who has obtained a patent for a process to inactivate viruses in plasma. He recalled a “short flirtation” in the 1980s, which was the sale of buildings The right to fly to increase income. Norman Selby, who was the chief operating officer at the time, said that this was just empty talk, but he said that executives believed that the Central East District was an underutilized and precious real estate, and they wanted to do better. Many ideas have been proposed to use or increase space.

Selby was transferred from McKinsey in the late 1980s to lead the financial transformation of the center. He stated that the non-profit organization must be financially self-sufficient to cover its high fixed costs, especially because its income rarely comes from monetary donations .

“We must make money,” Selby said.

The center has long been looking for alternative sources of income. The invention patent fees of its researchers, like the invention that Bonomo helped conceive, used to generate millions of dollars in revenue each year. Starting in 2018, revenue sources have decreased; CFO Moore attributed the decline to patent expiration. Another of its creations, a software platform for managing blood center operations, gave birth to Boss Solutions Group, a consulting and IT spin-off company that was sold at an undisclosed price in 2010.

The center also invests the remaining cash in private equity funds-which has proven to be profitable. The donation from the center is now $380 million. The recent acquisitions pushed its annual revenue from US$391 million in fiscal year 2019 to US$483.5 million in the following year.

Mohr said he is prioritizing expanding the licensing department to commercialize the researchers’ findings, which he said has been deprioritized for the past decade. He also expects the center’s cell therapy business to grow substantially.

The blood center is continuing to enter new markets. It opened a new donation center in Connecticut last week.

This story was originally published by our sister publication Crain’s New York Business.