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To fill a pair of life-sciences buildings on the East Side it built during the past decade, Alexandria Real Estate Equities recruited big pharmaceutical companies, like Eli Lilly and Roche, as anchor tenants. Now the firm is focusing on startups it hopes will spur the next wave of growth at its Alexandria Center for Life Science campus.

The firm today announced lease deals for roughly half its year-old, 15,000-square-foot LaunchLabs incubator. Most of the 13 tenants emerged from local academic and research institutions including New York University, Columbia, and the New York Genome Center. The products being explored include tissue implants from 3-D printers, drugs to heal scar tissue and genetically engineered organisms augmented with synthetic chromosomes.