A subsidiary of Chinese biotech giant Sichuan Biokin Pharmaceutical is leveraging a yearslong surge in demand for its cancer research findings with a deal to roughly quadruple its headquarters on the outskirts of downtown Seattle.
SystImmune, a biopharmaceutical company that develops popular antibody treatments, has finalized a deal to take over the entirety of the building at 22213 30th Drive SE in the Canyon Pointe office complex in Bothell, Washington. The roughly 87,275-square-foot lease with landlord Alexandria Real Estate Equities was signed earlier this month and is scheduled to take effect later this week, according to listing brokerage The Broderick Group.
It isn't immediately clear whether the deal will kick off a relocation for SystImmune or serve as an addition to the company's longstanding footprint in the Seattle area. The company's headquarters has been based in nearby Redmond, Washington, since its founding more than a decade ago. The biotech firm is currently associated with an address for a less than 20,000-square-foot building at the Pacific Business & Technology Center complex, but SystImmune did not immediately respond to CoStar News' requests for details as to how much space it occupies there.
Regardless, the Canyon Pointe lease marks a significant expansion for the fast-growing company, which in recent years has inked multibillion-dollar partnerships with pharmaceutical conglomerates such as Bristol Myers Squibb as demand for SystImmune's antibody-drug conjugates has soared.
The deal is also a significant win for Alexandria since the biotech firm will backfill the entirety of the space telecommunications giant T-Mobile recently left behind.
The Pasadena, California-based life science landlord acquired the two-building Canyon Pointe complex in 2022 as part of a broader Seattle-area shopping spree in which it dropped more than $470 million on purchases within a roughly yearlong span. The more than 176,000-square-foot campus was leased entirely to T-Mobile at the time of the $72.5 million deal, and while the wireless carrier continues to occupy the building at 22309 30th, it recently offloaded the property next door as part of a regional downsizing plan it’s implemented across its Pacific Northwest office portfolio.
The life science industry has long been a critical backbone for the Seattle office market, but a burst of new construction aimed at catering to biotech tenants has far outweighed demand in the region.
The vacancy rate for office buildings that include some component of lab space has crept toward 20%, higher than the nearly 17% rate reported across the broader office market, according to CoStar data. Developers have finished more than 1.5 million square feet of biotech-oriented office space over the past half decade, roughly 40% of which is still vacant.
Yet with an eye on major investments planned by biotech heavyweights such as Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly and Roche, among others, life science landlords in Seattle and elsewhere across the country are betting on an imminent boost in demand for real estate. Novartis, for example, recently signed a deal to occupy the entirety of a planned 466,598-square-foot, build-to-suit research building at Alexandria’s Campus Point complex in San Diego.
The lease represented the largest single lease in the landlord's three-decade history and could be emblematic of a fledgling turnaround for an office tenant base that has struggled to regain its earlier pandemic-era momentum.
This story was updated to correct the location of Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ headquarters.