Home Sweet Home: 11 Biotech Startups Land New Digs at Harvard Life Lab
September 9, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
A new biotech research incubator facility, Harvard Life Lab, is planning a grand opening on November 3 in Allston, a Boston neighborhood. Today the endeavor announced that it had chosen 11 startup companies to take up residence at the facility.
The Life Lab will have 15,000 square feet, and is located next to the i-Lab on Western Avenue. I-Lab is more student-oriented, and the university’s other life science incubator, Launch Lab, is more alumni-focused. All three sites have been founded in the last five years, and are part of Harvard’s focus on promoting Allston, Massachusetts as a technical and entrepreneurship center.
LabCentral, a biotech incubator in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, will manage the day-to-day operations of Life Lab. That will include biosafety, chemical management, and protocols. LabCentral’s president, Johannes Fruehauf, told The Harvard Crimson, that the Harvard Life Lab is “necessarily the first stop in [a biotech startup’s] entrepreneurial journey.”
One of the 11 companies chosen is Nix. Nix develops biometric sensors, primarily with athletes as the proposed target audience. “I hope I can bring a perspective to first-time entrepreneurs that’s helpful as they navigate some of these issues,” said Meridith Unger, Nix’s founder, chief executive officer, and a Harvard Business School alumna, to the Harvard Crimson. “And I think we can benefit from that too, whether it’s within the Harvard community or open to the larger Allston-Boston community.”
In addition to offering wet lab facilities and entrepreneurial support, Life Lab is expected to offer educational programming. This was part of the plan submitted to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which was approved in March. The educational plans are still being developed, but will probably involve workshops, seminars, and guest speakers.
The facility itself will have 36 lab benches, fume hoods, microscopy areas, and tissue culture facilities. It will also have a private faculty-in-residence suite, co-working spaces, and conference rooms.
Speaking to the Redevelopment Board in March, Andrew O’Brien, Harvard’s Business School chief of operations, said, “It is a pilot project, we want to see if we can develop this building adjacent to the i-Lab and see how productive we can be in accelerating the startup of these life science businesses.”
The 11 companies chosen range from blood testing to medical devices to sanitation solutions for developing countries. Jodi Goldstein, director of Harvard Innovation Lab, indicated that 45 percent of the companies chosen were founded by women. She says that the selection committee based their choices on “the quality of their application and science, stage of development, potential for impact, and ability to be a strong community member.”
The Life Lab is expected to eventually house 25 to 30 life science startups. Part of the idea is to help the companies find Series A funding more quickly, and most teams, according to Goldstein, will probably stay at the facility for about 18 months.
Laboratory space, office space and equipment access is expected to rent to the startups for about $2,500 per month, about half of what the current going rate is for wet lab space in the area.
The selection committee included Alan Crane of Polaris Partners, Mark Fishman of Novartis (NVS), Johannes Fruehauf of LabCentral, Jennifer Lewis of Harvard and Voxel8, and Srikant Data, the Harvard faculty chairman of the i-Lab.