"Many organizations just pull a list of all available space and make you figure out which one fits your firm's needs. EDGE actually listened to our requirements and provided our organization with a summary of options that was in our target location, size and cost."
- Samuel Seymour, COO, Centurum
Robert J. Walden, Managing Partner
–BIO
Real Estate
Mr. Walden has over 25 years of executive level experience in Maryland-based, life science companies. He has accumulated considerable strategic, financial and operating knowledge of rapidly growing life science companies, whose activities span basic and pre-clinical research, clinical development, manufacturing and international sales. Mr. Walden has experience raising both public and private capital, as well as negotiating and executing major facility development and relocation programs encompassing significant state and local incentives.
Mr. Walden was Chief Financial Officer of the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) from 1986 to 1995. Operating since 1925, the ATCC preserves and annually distributes tens of thousands of different biological specimens world-wide – and is widely regarded as a unique and irreplaceable national resource serving the international scientific community. Prior to leaving the ATCC, Mr. Walden led a multi-year facility development effort that entailed three site acquisitions followed by a nation-wide search for suitable relocation options – an effort successfully concluded by securing one of the largest relocation incentive packages for a life science company in the Washington metropolitan area.
Subsequent to ATCC, Mr. Walden joined Osiris Therapeutics, Inc. as the Chief Financial Officer from 1995 through 1996. Upon joining Osiris, Mr. Walden led the facility development and relocation of the company from Cleveland, Ohio to its new, 30,000 square foot state-of-the-art stem cell research facility in Baltimore, Maryland. Leveraging the company’s new location in an economic development zone, Mr. Walden worked with various state and local agencies to secure full project financing and a two-tier lease structure tailored to mitigate key construction and occupancy risks.
Mr. Walden next joined Large Scale Biology Corporation (LSBC), a “proteomics” company involved in protein discovery and expression. During Mr. Walden’s tenure with the company from 1996 through 2004, he held the position of Chief Financial Officer and, subsequent to a merger and IPO, Divisional President. Mr. Walden led the leasing and custom build-out of the company’s 50,000 square foot research and high-throughput analytical facility in Rockville, Maryland, and was successful in negotiating a cash-neutral sublease for the entire facility following consolidation to the company’s headquarters. After LSBC, Mr. Walden held the position of Executive Director of Finance at GenVec, Inc. from 2004 through 2007. While at GenVec, Mr. Walden gained additional experience regarding late stage clinical development programs and performed detailed analyses on various options for securing cGMP manufacturing facilities.
Mr. Walden is a graduate of the University of Maryland where he obtained his Bachelor’s of Science degree in finance.
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