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“SmartLabs, a Boston-based provider of flex lab space, is taking over the third floor of the CambridgeSide mall.
The company has signed a lease for the 140,000 square feet that New England Development is converting to lab and office space on that level of the Cambridge shopping center.
SmartLabs employs what it calls a “laboratory-as-a-service” model, with tenants given "fractionalized access" to labs and production capabilities in one setting.
The CambridgeSide location, expected to open in late 2024, will be SmartLabs’ largest yet. It also has locations in the Seaport District, Brighton’s Boston Landing, Kendall Square and Cambridgeport, as well as sites in San Francisco and Philadelphia.
The agreement is one of the largest life sciences leases signed in Greater Boston in recent months. New England Development, which owns CambridgeSide alongside an unidentified UBS Asset Management client, originally intended to make the third floor purely office space, but pivoted to labs last year amid the hardening of remote-work habits.
The Boston-based development firm and UBS are also building a 10-story, 365,000-square-foot life sciences complex at the mall, at what had been a Macy’s. The core and shell of that project, known as 20 CambridgeSide, is on pace to be built out by late 2023, said Douglass Karp, president of New England Development.“