Boston Tops Bay Area to Lead U.S. Life-Sciences Lab Construction

Boston, with more lab space under construction than anywhere else in the U.S., is poised to surpass the San Francisco Bay Area as the country’s biggest hub for life sciences.

For now, the Boston metropolitan area, including Cambridge, is slightly smaller with about 32 million square feet (3 million square meters) of life-sciences space, compared with almost 34 million in the Bay Area, according to Colliers. But Boston has 62 million square feet under construction or proposed -- far more than the 18 million square feet in the West Coast metro, a report by the brokerage shows.

The Boston ...