Castle Biosciences is staking an even bigger claim on Pittsburgh’s North Side. The diagnostics firm, which opened lab space at Nova Place in 2023, is significantly enlarging its footprint at the complex, adding to a streak of large leases and reinforcing Nova Place’s emerging identity as a tech and lab campus for the city. New company filings and market reports do not line up perfectly on square footage, suggesting the expansion is rolling out in phases.
CBRE report lists roughly 66,000 square feet
An office leasing report, as reported by WPXI, says Castle has expanded and extended its lease at Nova Place to about 66,000 square feet, building on a footprint that had already grown to more than 40,000 square feet. According to that reporting, some of the added space will come out of PNC’s legacy presence at the campus, and Jeremy Leventhal of Faros Properties called the deal "a great opportunity for both of us."
Company filings show a phased expansion
Castle’s own paperwork sketches out a more incremental path. A March 2024 first amendment to the company’s Nova Place lease adds 23,821 rentable square feet and sets an expansion that would bring the premises to roughly 44,677 rentable square feet as of an expansion date tied to May 1, 2026, subject to landlord work. The amendment details a cap on the landlord’s expansion work and the mechanics for an earlier expansion if the build-out wraps ahead of schedule. See Castle Biosciences for full details.
Nova Place’s push to be a life sciences hub
Nova Place, the redevelopment of the former Allegheny Center, has been marketed as a multi-building campus with roughly 1.2 million square feet of office space and a steady stream of large leases, per CBRE. Castle’s 2023 ribbon cutting for a roughly 20,000 square foot laboratory at Nova Place doubled its prior local lab capacity and established the company’s Pittsburgh operations as a growing hub for its diagnostics work, according to the company’s announcement.
What this means for jobs and the cluster
Local reporting has tracked Castle’s Pittsburgh headcount climbing as the lab scaled operations, a data point often cited when people talk about the region’s budding biotech cluster, per Technical.ly. The Castle expansion sits alongside other major moves to Nova Place, including Duquesne Light’s planned headquarters relocation, which together suggest more consolidated employment and lab capacity on the North Side, according to the utility’s announcement.
Castle is publicly traded under the ticker CSTL and lists Friendswood, Texas, as its corporate base in company materials. If the larger footprint is fully realized, it would add lab capacity and the potential for more Pittsburgh hiring while further cementing Nova Place’s transformation into a tech and lab campus.
