The 20,000 sq ft building sits within the Kings Hall Life Sciences Park in south Belfast, a hub for life sciences companies of all sizes, and provides grade A offices, laboratories and shared spaces. It is also located in close proximity to healthcare professionals operating within the park and Belfast’s hospitals and universities.
Danske Bank supported the purchase of the new building by owner O’Connor McCann Ltd through a £4.7m green loan.
The lead tenant in the building is Diaceutics plc, a leading diagnostic commercialisation company, which has taken 10,000 sq ft of the Dataworks building to create its new headquarters in Northern Ireland.
Diaceutics, which created the world’s first diagnostic commercialisation platform (DXRX) for precision medicine, provides unrivalled access to multiple pipelines of real-world diagnostic testing data from a global network of laboratories to ultimately improve the efficiency of patient testing for a range of diseases by reducing the timeline for a patient to secure optimal treatment for their condition. The company, which is listed on the AIM Market of the London Stock Exchange, has created commercially useful data sets for every precision medicine that has come to market. It now employs 149 people in Belfast and globally and posted revenues of £13.9m in its most recent financial results, a 20 per cent increase on the year before.
Peter Keeling, CEO of Diaceutics, said:
“We have invested significantly in our Belfast Headquarters which not only reinforces our commitment to the region but also our commitment to provide a sustainable and inspiring place where our people can work as the business grows.
“Being located in the first genuine life sciences park in a building which has been completed to the highest environmental standards, alongside first-class medical research facilities, underpins our desire to ensure Northern Ireland’s long-term competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy.
”Our stakeholders are increasingly informing their decisions based on our environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials and we believe that our ESG efforts are crucial to our long-term value creation and growth. This isn’t just about creating a policy for our annual report but instead it is at the heart of our company strategy as this is the only way to have a lasting positive impact on our environment and society.”
Paul Currid, Corporate Banking Manager at Danske Bank, added:
“We’re really pleased to have been able to facilitate the purchase of this building through a green loan and to see it being used as the new headquarters for one of the region’s most innovative and fastest growing medical technology companies.
“At Danske Bank sustainability is top of the agenda and that means both becoming greener in our own operations but also helping our customers on their journey to becoming more sustainable. Sustainability is increasingly important for companies in a number of sectors and we expect demand for sustainable finance to continue to rise.”
