San Jose biotech firm to move headquarters to Lower Gwynedd

A San Jose-based biotechnology firm specializing in early cancer detection will relocate its headquarters next spring to a sprawling facility in Lower Gwynedd, Montgomery County.

Anpac Bio signed a 10-year lease Oct. 9 and will move into a newly constructed 6,724-square-foot office at the Spring House Innovation Park in March, said Shaun Gong, deputy president of Anpac Bio’s branch in North America. The company, founded in 2008, had been looking to expand to the East Coast.

“Strategically, we would like to have another lab in another part of the country," he said. "After screening different places, we really think Philadelphia has a lot of things to offer.”

Philadelphia’s life science industry has attracted 51,000 people, ranking as the eighth most popular U.S. hub for the profession, according to the commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE. It is preceded by Boston-Cambridge, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, New Jersey, Raleigh-Durham, Washington D.C.-Baltimore, and New York City, according to the firm, and trailed by Los Angeles and Chicago.

Anpac, which will keep its office in San Jose, will bring 10 of its 100 employees to the Spring House complex, Gong said. They range from lab technicians to administrators.

“This build-to-suit laboratory space at Spring House Innovation Park will make for a premier facility and allow Anpac to meet all of its technical requirements," Tony Rossi, senior vice president of CBRE, said in a statement.

Anpac, founded by Penn State alumnus Chris Yu, has patented what it calls Cancer Differentiation Analysis technology, or CDA. Capable of more quickly identifying 26 types of cancer, CDA was lauded as “game-changing” at a Nobel Prize Laureate Summit on Biomedical Science.