New York City’s working hard to position itself as a key life sciences hub.
Citing the city’s many hospitals and deep history of medical innovation, the initiative just announced that it is expanding its Early-Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative. It’s a $150 million public-private economic development effort that plans to up the city’s allocated R&D space by 150 percent.
The initiative aims to create 2,000 new life sciences jobs by 2020, in the fields of therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics, R&D instrumentation and digital health. It’ll also redevelop an underutilized, 14-story building on First Avenue and East 26th St. to building a new bioscience research center that houses 100,000 square feet of new wet lab space. Another expansion of wet lab space is at the Alexandria Center – which offers a total of 1.1 million square feet of available wet lab and office space.
The funding for all this comes from the NYC Economic Development Council, as well as from industry partners like Celgene, GE Ventures and Eli Lilly. Venture capital firms Flagship Ventures and ARCH Venture Partners are participating as well, with Flagship investing directly in therapeutics and ARCH covering the rest of the life sciences startup investments.
“Innovation remains the central driver for creating transformative medicines for patients. Building environments capable of fostering innovation has never been more critical than during this emerging period of breakthroughs and technological promise,” Thomas Daniel, M.D., Executive Vice President, Research & Early Development for Celgene said in a statement. “The exceptional life sciences ecosystem in the New York City area offers fertile opportunity for rewards from catalytic investment coupled with cooperation and vision.”
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Kyle McCluer]
