A trio of tenants will occupy nearly 50K SF in a new Class-A life sciences building in New York’s Long Island City, the New York Business Journal reports. The deals are a hopeful sign for the city’s biotech backers, who hope the sector can bring jobs and increase its footprint within the overall commercial real estate market.

Innolabs, the new 267K SF lab and office development, is the first New York property by Boston-based developers King Street Properties, one of the largest private owners of lab space, with roughly 3M SF under management. Its investment in Long Island City was seen as a big vote of confidence for the growing cluster of lab properties in Long Island City.

The tenants are Opentrons, which focuses on affordable lab automation, the Pandemic Response Lab, which helps process Covid testing samples, and Neochromosome, which utilizes its synthetic biology technology to produce “designer DNA.”

New York City’s life sciences market has been looking to break out for years, but the high development costs, space constraints and relatively nascent ecosystem have been a barrier to growth. Earlier this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city was doubling its $500M LifeSci NYC initiative to incentivize the growth of biotech in the city.