its agreement earlier this year to invest as much as $450 million in 10 early stage biotech companies with San Diego’s Avalon Ventures. The partners recently said the first startup to come out of their collaboration is Sitari Pharmaceuticals, a biotech developing new treatments for celiac disease.
GSK certainly isn’t the only pharma company looking to set up shop close by life science innovators in the leading biotech hubs of the U.S. Pfizer, Sanofi, Merck, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, and many others have set up offices in prime real estate locations near academics and entrepreneurs, and sought to form more productive working relationships so they can acquire a steady stream of innovative new products that don’t naturally arise in their own company labs.
McDevitt says GSK wants to “better enhance our strategic discovery collaboration with Avalon Ventures where we plan to build up to 10 biotech companies together in San Diego.” McDivett is on a joint committee with Avalon partner Jay Lichter that oversees the collaboration.
“For Avalon/COI and other West Coast GSK collaborators this is outstanding news,” says Lichter, who also heads COI Pharmaceuticals, a life sciences startup accelerator Avalon created to serve as a shared R&D resource. “It will make our collaboration even better.”
In his e-mail, McDevitt writes, “This presence will help to increase our R&D visibility and give us access to innovation in this key biotech hub, as well as act as a base to access external innovation and novel opportunities from across the entire US West Coast corridor from San Diego-Los Angeles- San Francisco- Seattle. This decision will help position GSK as a more integral part of the local San Diego and West coast ecosystem of VCs, biotechs, and academics and build trust as a partner of choice.”
The San Diego office plans to focus mostly on new business development by working with academia, venture, biotech and pharmaceutical partners. McDevitt says the office will likely have between five and 10 employees.
It’s a small group, but as Avalon’s Lichter put it, “Recall, that before Pfizer bought WarnerLambert and took over the old Agouron site, they [had] a small office in San Mateo. Big things come in small steps.”
