During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dennis Kirkpatrick noticed a fundamental shift in the U.S. life sciences sector.
Kirkpatrick, a co-leader of Redwood City, California-based DPR’s life sciences core market segment, saw an industry that previously had hubs across the world come roaring back to the U.S., as large pharmaceutical firms looked to provide vaccines and medicine to the population.
Today, the life sciences segment makes up 20% of DPR’s revenue, Kirkpatrick told Construction Dive, and he doesn’t see demand slowing any time soon.
Here, Kirkpatrick talks with Construction Dive about the way the life sciences market has shifted, how builders erect these projects and how tech has played a role in speeding up schedules.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: What’s top of mind for you about the pharmaceutical construction market?
DENNIS KIRKPATRICK: Ten years ago, a lot of these manufacturing facilities were being built overseas in the hubs of manufacturing, places like Puerto Rico in the past, Ireland, Europe, Singapore, India, China.
Dennis Kirkpatrick
Permission granted by DPR Construction
After the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen an influx of manufacturing projects, with these big pharmaceutical firms really investing in the United States. But that’s not just U.S. Big Pharma, that’s foreign companies coming in as well to meet the demand of the patient population.
How has that building environment changed since that time?
What really has influenced things, like schedule and what can be accomplished, was the pandemic. We were involved, and our peers were involved, in building a number of these facilities that produced the COVID-19 vaccines.
They were built in timelines that nobody could ever believe was possible in the past, and that mentality has stayed with us. Facilities used to take maybe five years. Now they’re taking three, two years. So there are significant reductions in that overall schedule.
What technologies are you using to meet these truncated timelines?
There’s lots of technology. BIM is the big word that’s been around forever in VDC. Historically, a lot of it was used more on the design side.
It’s become, how do we as builders get earlier in the design process to influence the design, the model, the sequencing of how we’re going to build it, and then take those technologies and softwares into the field of where we’re building it, to truly track and manage things?
Now we can truly track and manage really predictable outcomes, like productivity, the earned values. Where we really are, day to day, on a live feed, versus where we were before.
Where do you view life sciences demand going from this point?
The sheer number of Food and Drug Administration applications for drugs, for clinical trials, is only going up.
Artificial intelligence and leveraging algorithms that can quickly analyze large data sets is really driving the ability for these companies to quickly focus their research to get to that end goal of providing that product for the patient.
The global population isn’t declining, right?
There’s always a need for solutions for patients, whether it’s large patient population-type products or novel therapies, we really don’t see it slowing down anytime soon.
