more biotech incubators to help startups get off the ground. In 2017, Taconic Investment Partners and Silverstein Properties, announced plans to put $20 million into the “Hudson Research Center,” a life sciences facility being developed on the West Side. Alexandria Real Estate Equities debuted LaunchLabs with 13 startups in tow, and another biotech incubator, BioLabs@NYULangone, officially opened in December with four startups in the fold. A third, JLabs, is expected to open at the New York Genome Center this year.
“But now the question everybody’s asking is, where do they go after the incubators?” says Maria Gotsch, president and CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City.
Indeed, New York City biotech, right now, is largely a sprawl of academic centers and startup incubators spread around Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Alexandria Center for Life Science, the city’s largest operational life sciences complex, is one piece of the puzzle, but it is too expensive for many startups to afford. Brooklyn’s BioBAT, a step-up facility in South Brooklyn for growing biotechs, is another, but it is far flung from the academic institutions lining the East Side of Manhattan and elsewhere. “We want to hit critical mass,” says Farzan-Kashani. “That’s our objective.”
The hub is seen as a key feature toward this effort, and a few things are on the wish list of those invested in growing companies in New York City.
Rizzuto says the campus has to have two important features. The first is a large pharmaceutical company conducting research within the campus. (Big Pharma companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb have corporate offices in New York, but not labs.) This would be a “magnet” for talent and a safety net for those looking for biotech jobs in the city. The second need is “a larger footprint” of more affordable lab space, he says.
Lux Capital partner Adam Goulburn is encouraged by the city’s efforts, calling it a “positive move.” But he adds that what is needed are multiple Alexandria Center-style buildings in an area that can mimic a Cambridge or a South San Francisco; a dense place where people are bumping into each other. “The ecosystem needs to think outside the box about where that will be,” he says.
That will be up to the group with the best idea of how to spend $100 million. “Once we know what the private sector is prepared to do,” Gotsch says, “then we can have a better sense of what we think is possible.”
Photo by Flickr user Jens karlsson via a Creative Commons license.
