About a year after breaking ground on the project, Mayo Clinic officially opened a 60,000-square-foot expansion of its Superior Drive Support Center on Tuesday.
The Superior Drive Support Center, which houses Mayo Medical Laboratories, is located at 3050 Superior Drive NW. The three-story addition built on the south side of the complex. Mayo Clinic is moving its the toxicology, endocrinology and proteomic core labs to the new space from downtown. They expect to be fully moved in by April.
Moving those three labs out of the Hilton Building will open up 24,000-square-feet of space. While this expansion will not bring new jobs, it will mean moving 150 to 170 people out of downtown to join the more than 1,000 Mayo Medical Labs employees at the Superior Drive complex.
"That's essential to allow other Mayo labs to decompress," said Dr. Matt Binnicker, the chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology's Facilities and Space Committee, in 2014. "Having those labs here makes a lot of sense."
Mayo Medical Labs, which generates revenue for Mayo Clinic, performs about 20 million tests for more than 4,000 hospitals annually.
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Binnicker explained that while the three labs handle tests for both Mayo Clinic's patients and Mayo Medical Labs clinical customers, about 90 to 95 percent of their work is for MML.
Mayo Clinic moved into the 13-year-old complex in 2004. By 2011, about 800 employees worked at the facility. It originally was built by electronics manufacturer Celestica Inc. in 2001. When that company closed its Rochester operation, the building was left empty.
Mayo Clinic leased the property for eight years, until it paid $18.5 million in August 2012 to buy it. Before that, it was owned by 17 national investors through Triple Net Properties of Santa Ana, Calif., until they defaulted on the mortgage in 2012. The investors bought the property for $36.8 million in 2006.
When the mortgage defaulted, HSBC Bank USA took over the property. HSCB then sold it to Mayo Clinic.
While it originally was under construction, New York City-based W. P. Carey & Co. LLC bought the complex from Celestica, which leased it back. W.P. Carey later sold it for about 70 percent more than the $21.6 million it paid.
