The lease is for all of the fourth and fifth floors and part of the second floor of the five-story building, which is close to its main campus at the south end of Lake Union. The terms of the lease were not immediately available, and executives at Pasadena, CA-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities did not return phone calls seeking comment. The base lease rate at the REIT's other Eastlake buildings is in the low $40s per sf per year, according to the company's most recent SEC filing.

Fred Hutch will share the second floor with Accelerator Corp., a biotech incubator project of Alexandria, three venture capital firms and the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology. The third floor of the building remains available.

Not including 1616 Eastlake, the company owns six Seattle properties totaling 486,267 sf. The portfolio was all but 100% leased at the end of 2003 and generated more than $16.5 million in base rent annually. It also is preparing to add a $25-million, 10-story laboratory building to its 210,000-sf First Hill research and development campus, which it acquired from Fred Hutch in 1996. The project will replace an existing 55,000-sf building at 1102 Columbia St. with one that has 130,000-sf of lab space over five levels of underground parking.