Bioscience Incubators Attract Big Pharma as Bristol-Myers Squibb Offers Startups Cambridge Lab Space

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Reported by Annette Kreuger, Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--It is an offer that simply would not have happened 10 or 20 years ago. A major player in the Pharmaceutical-Biotech Industry, in this case, Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMS) (New York City, New York), lending a financial hand to small startup life science companies. While still incredibly competitive and proprietary, the industry has come to value nascent firms that offer promising potential to possibly beef up their product pipelines.

Affordable advanced "wet lab" space is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to any small company. Often costing upwards of $500 per square foot to build, the initial early stage ideas might be there, but not the cash to take the development further. This dilemma has spawned the rise of life science accelerators or incubators popping up across the country, all offering some form of wet lab space and business development aid to help move those promising ideas closer to reality.

In this case, BMS has teamed up with LabCentral (Cambridge, Massachusetts) to construct an annual program offering two lucky firms space at LabCentral's new shared lab space site in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kendall Square is renowned for being the "address" for some of the industry's biggest and best companies' research facilities.

The shared lab space concept first popped up on university campuses, all hoping to launch alumni's successful companies and ultimately, having them grow in place. Evolving from the forerunners of the incubator concept--basic office space and printers--some of these facilities have gone on to include clinical-scale manufacturing capacity.

LabCentral's Cambridge space includes not only the common equipment needed for bioresearch, but help with permitting and the other myriad details involved in drug development. Some of the equipment offered rivals that found in any modern drug research facility, including autoclaves, deionized water, vacuum and gas supply, as well as chemical hoods and BSL-2 cell-culture facilities, centrifuges, vortex, shakers, glassware, freezers, storage facilities, flow cytometry, PCR, plate readers, imaging station, luminometry and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).

And Big Pharma is closely watching these extremely small players. It was simply prudent to expand their playbook to include keeping an eye on those startups that align with their particular therapeutic focus.

It can take well over a decade and more than a billion dollars to develop a drug and bring it to market, that is, if it passes all the clinical trials and approval. An appalling amount of money and time is simply lost when a drug candidate simply isn't viable, no matter how promising it once appeared to be. Offering some financial help in a setting already designed to streamline the process and trim waste is a small price to pay for what could lead to a major drug candidate.

Forgoing any middleman at all, another industry major, Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) (New Brunswick, New Jersey), has been investing in building its own "JLab Innovation Centers" across the country. All with a focus on harboring and helping launch promising life science companies. The most recent JLab opened in Houston's famed Medical Center district late in 2015.

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