Rockville, MD – Two executives with Scheer Partners have played a key role in completing a new Maryland lease for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that represents one of the largest transactions in 2012 for the medical-research agency beyond its main Bethesda campus.
Scheer Partners, the leading provider of fully integrated commercial real estate services for the health science industry in the Washington and Baltimore metropolitan areas, announces today that it has negotiated on behalf of Alexandria Real Estate Equities in a 75,056-square-foot lease for the NIH at 9800 Medical Center Drive in Rockville.
In this 15-year lease, Robert Scheer, the founder and president of Scheer Partners, and Matt Brady, a company vice president, represented Pasadena, Calif.-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities, which owns the 281,475-square-foot building in the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center where the NIH’s Chemical Genomics Center already resides and will occupy its additional space.
Says Brady: “This new lease is a further boost to the prestigious 315-acre biotechnology park, which has benefited from strong NIH activity along Medical Center Drive, including the most recent deal for the Chemical Genomics Center, as well as the National Cancer Institute’s planned 575,000 square feet on Johns Hopkins University’s Montgomery County campus.”
The four-building complex at 9800 Medical Center Drive – previously owned and occupied by Human Genome Sciences, which British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline recently acquired – is now nearly 100 percent leased to tenants such as Advanced BioScience Laboratories, Canon U.S. Life Sciences and Sanaria.
This year has proven a busy one for the NIH, which through the U.S. General Services Administration, the federal government’s real estate arm, has both expanded and downsized various facilities in the D.C. market outside of the medical-research agency’s primary site at 9000 Rockville Pike.
Created in 2008, the Chemical Genomics Center is tasked with translating the discoveries of the Human Genome Project into biological and disease insights and, ultimately, new therapeutics, according to the NIH’s Web site.