Brindley Healthcare Ltd.

Having left behind a stellar legacy in Merck’s headquarters in Kenilworth, NJ, Roger Perlmutter ’s next chapter of drug R&D will be written in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eikon Therapeutics, the ambitious biotech startup helmed by Perlmutter, has signed a long-term lease to set up its new corporate headquarters in a new life sciences campus being developed by Alexandria Real Estate Equities in Millbrae, CA. As the anchor tenant, Eikon will command about 285,000 square feet — enough to accommodate up to 750 employees. The move across the San Francisco Bay from Hayward, where the company has been based, to Millbrae will put Eikon closer to the heart of the biotech hub in South San Francisco, clustered near Genentech in Oyster Point. “Eikon Therapeutics was born out of the San Francisco Bay Area’s interconnected community of world-class research universities, venture capital firms, and technology and life sciences companies, and we are proud to expand our presence in the region,” Perlmutter said in a statement. With technologies from Howard Hughes’ Eric Betzig and Robert Tijan out of UC Berkeley, Eikon is striving to define, in Perlmutter’s words, “an area of biochemistry that previously was recondite.” The idea is to apply super resolution microscopy — which allows scientists to evaluate the movement of any protein in the cell, whether membrane bound, nuclear, nucleolar or mitochondrial, and make movies that show these proteins moving around — to drug discovery. Not only is Eikon doing it on a grand scale, it’s also running an “entirely bespoke system,” Perlmutter told Endpoints News last year. Perlmutter has recruited quite a few of his former Merck colleagues to join him on the drug hunt, appointing Roy Baynes as CEO and tapping Ken Frazier to the board. And with $668 million in cash from two rounds, backers haven given them plenty of time and freedom to make good on the promise of ultimately delivering life-changing medicines.