The nonprofit Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences is selling its 56-acre Research Triangle Park campus for $20 million as part of a sale, lease-back deal.
Hamner announced the deal Monday with Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a California firm that focuses on properties for the life science industry.
Hamner CEO William Greenlee said the transaction allows it to focus on its scientific research while Alexandria handles the development of the campus. The deal includes the institute's 140,000-square-foot headquarters and laboratory building on Davis Drive as well as the adjacent land.
Alexandria is well-known among the Triangle's life science companies. It owns about 840,000 square feet of lab and office space in the Triangle that it leases to companies such as Bayer AG and Eisai, as well as Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill. It's also building a 50,000-square-foot, $13.5 million agricultural-technology research center near RTP.
Hamner and Alexandria also have teamed up to form what they're calling the Research Triangle Park Collaboration Consortium.
Greenlee deferred to Alexandria CEO Joel Marcus on the details of that collaboration but indicated that Alexandria will be recruiting companies and academic organizations to move to the site. Many of those organizations may be interested in a partnership with Hamner, but such a relationship won't be a requirement, he said.
Efforts to contact Marcus for comment were unsuccessful. The real estate company said in a release that the RTP Collaboration is the first of a planned network of life science hubs.
