Duke University is moving 300 employees to downtown Durham -- an important jolt to a reviving center city and a once-lonely office tower.

Duke Clinical Research Institute, a division of the university's medical school, agreed to lease 72,000 square feet at Durham Centre, the 14-story, reflective blue office building on the northern edge of the Downtown Loop.

Financial terms of the 10-year lease were not disclosed.

The space will allow what has become the world's biggest academic clinical research organization to consolidate and expand several offices currently on Duke's campus, while taking further strides to improve its relationship with the city that surrounds it.

"Duke will be taking a more visible role to demonstrate its commitment" to an economically sound future for the city of Durham, said Phail Wynn, Duke's vice president of Durham regional affairs.

The institute conducts and consults with companies on clinical trials, helping to coordinate worldwide drug and medical-device research primarily for pharmaceutical companies and academics.

"Because of its international prominence, it will bring a lot of people to downtown," said Monte Brown, vice president for administration at Duke University Health System, who oversees facilities and construction for the institute.

The deal also ends a long wait for Durham Centre, which will be 90 percent full. The 200,000-square-foot tower has been mostly empty for about half a decade, following the departure of anchor tenant Monumental Life Insurance. The vacancy came on the heels of the decline of the tobacco industry.

Growing financial and technology companies have since flowed to the Bull City, expanding downtown's work force almost 25 percent to 16,000 employees during the past four years, according to booster group Downtown Durham Inc.

Meanwhile, downtown's office vacancy rate dropped to 13.1 percent at the end of the third quarter, from 19.8 percent amid a building boom that increased the submarket's office supply by 60 percent, Karnes Research data show.

But the bustle avoided Durham Centre. The revival instead happened several blocks south, in abandoned tobacco warehouses. Capitol Broadcasting converted more than half a million square feet into offices and restaurants, wooing tenants with amenities such as a YMCA and a minor-league baseball stadium.

In June, as investors were paying record prices for Triangle office buildings, the less-than-half-full Durham Centre was sold to Craig Davis Properties of Cary for $19.2 million. That was 6.4 percent less than what seller Edina Park Plaza Associates paid a decade earlier and about 45 percent less than what buildings of its caliber fetched at the time.

The new owner embarked on extensive interior renovation. About $4.2 million in city money also was made available for renovations to a city-owned parking deck under the building -- support Jack Dunn, president of Craig Davis Properties, credited for the building's turnaround.