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Broad Institute Spinout is Pursuing Drugs for Intractable Disease Targets
PHILADELPHIA --(August 13, 2009) – More than 40 high-paying life sciences jobs will remain in West Philadelphia as two life sciences companies move into the University City Science Center’s newest building at 3711 Market Street on the Avenue of Technology in Philadelphia, PA.
Leading the way is Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Inc., with 37 jobs. Just four years after it spun out of the University of Pennsylvania, Avid has outgrown the 5,000 square feet of space it occupied in the University City Science Center’s Port Business Incubator for startup companies at 3624 Market Street. Today, Avid announced that it moved into 16,000 square feet of custom-fitted office and lab space on the seventh floor of the Science Center’s new 155,000-square foot building at 3711 Market Street.
Elk Run has announced the details of the first building planned for the 2,325 acre development in Pine Island, Minnesota. The article in Genomeweb BioRegion News says that the 40,000SF building is designed to provide lab-flex space capable of supporting research and development activities as well as light manufacturing.
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The Cape Cod Algae Biorefinery is the result of a public-private consortium between the company Plankton Power and the business incubator Regional Technology Development Corp. (RTDC) proposed to produce biodiesel from an algae based process in Borne, Massachusetts. The article in Algae News on
algaenews.blogspot.com says that the proposal is for a 5 acre pilot development plant submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy for $20 million.
According to the article, Power Plankton plans to produce one million gallons of biodiesel a year, enough to support Cape Cod's current consumption of biodiesel. The Cape Cod Algae Biorefinery Consortium could then scale up production to 100 million gallons of biodiesel with a 100 acre site; this would meet 5% of Massachusetts demand for diesel fuel.
The University of Iowa Research Foundation (UIRF) manages the University’s substantial technology commercialization program and has licensed a number of inventions and discoveries to companies that are collaborating with university faculty and to entrepreneurs associated with the University. Until recently, life science companies spun-out from University of Iowa were located on the UI Research Park but were spread across the Park in a number of different facilities. All of that began to change last November with the opening of the BioVentures Center, The University of Iowa’s new business incubator specifically designed for life science companies.
California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) has recently made a new addition to their already broad network of innovation. I spoke with Douglas Crawford QB3 Director of Industry Alliances & Associate Executive Director, he described the incubator scene in Mission Bay and the motivations that led to the augmentation of QB3’s services and the formation of QB3 Mission Bay Incubator Network. The new network is a cooperation of QB3, the City of San Francisco and FibroGen. And soon, fortunes willing, by the end of the year, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. will make additional space available for small start-up companies.
QB3 is forwarding a multidisciplinary approach to the biological sciences. Drawing on the strengths and resources of three closely situated branches of University of California’s system including UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz, QB3 formally integrates the quantitative sciences to rear a new generation of researchers in the fields of synthetic biology, bioengineering, computational biology, experimental genomics, and proteomics in addition to the more established sciences of biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology.
The initiative has worked perhaps even better than they had hoped. University of California and more specifically QB3 have produced more inventions and discoveries than they actually know what to do with. QB3’s business incubator, QB3 Garage gets its name from the famous garage where the giants of innovation, Hewlett and Packard formed Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, California. It is the dream of QB3 that the inclusion of the quantitative sciences will usher in a remarkable generation of technological insight and invention.
QB3 Garage has a strategic goal, which is to invite and excite University of California entrepreneurs to create more young successful companies; the only problem is that it has been full since it opened three years ago. QB3’s Garage program is so effective that they must turn away many requests for tenancy on an almost daily basis. When that happens Douglas tells the applicant about space elsewhere if he knows of any. Other places in the area that sometimes have space are: San Jose BioCenter the Grandparent of California bio incubation; The Molecular Medicine Research Institute (MMRI), where leases are not signed for space but for the number of people involved; The Molecular Sciences Institute (MSI) like MMRI, while also a research institute, rents extra space if they have it; and MandalMed, a small biotech company located in the SOMA district, also leases out lab space through their incubator Bioscience Laboratories.
Recently QB3 in cooperation with other organizations in the Mission Bay area including the San Francisco Center for Economic Development, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has reached an agreement with FibroGen. FibroGen has generously agreed to rent tiny units of space on the same terms that QB3 does for the Garage, and there are hopes that in the coming year, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. will also have some additional space for small start-ups in Mission Bay.
Of the first crop of ten companies, QB3 Garage has had twelve tenants, but of the first ten, four have gone on to close venture rounds, and one was acquired for $25 million by Affymetrix. Douglas explained that there is a class of companies that are created that incubators enable, that could not be created otherwise, that can go on to do great things.
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The Molecular Medicine Research Institute (MMRI) www.mmrx.org
Photo Credits: California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences and Douglas Crawford
Three additional awards brings second round to nearly $2 million
Waltham, MA – The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center has completed its second round of New Investigator Matching Grants by awarding $600,000 to three Harvard-affiliated researchers. These grants supplement the $1,380,256 awarded last month to seven other young scientists. The Center’s New Investigator Grants advance the careers of New Investigators who are working on innovative life sciences research at Massachusetts research institutions.
