A communal area at the Mass Innovation Labs facility
It’s hard to get excited about a biotech shared-space in 2016.
Four years ago, it was an exciting and rapidly diversifying field. Now incubators are par for the course, with most Big Pharma and many institutions operating their own version.
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Mass Innovation Labs was late to the game, opening in May 2015. But it is clearly doing something different.
According to CEO Amrit Chaudhuri, graduates of Mass Innovation Lab’s program have collectively licensed and raised over $4 billion. The overall valuation of those companies now exceeds $40 billion.
That’s not all due to Mass Innovation Labs, but they have played an influential role in scaling many notable companies, including CRISPR Therapeutics and Editas Medicine.
So what’s the secret sauce?
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In a phone interview, Chaudhuri described the company as an “accelerated commercialization space.”
While incubators support initial research and proof-of-concept, Mass Innovation Labs is a resource for start-ups that have something substantial on paper and in the bank. More like a boarding school, than a biotech daycare or elementary.
The initial program was designed to grow 1-5 person teams into 50-100 person companies.
“Our biggest concern was how do you take a team that has really high-quality science and help them progress into a real commercial entity,” Chaudhuri said.
He tackled that challenge with the company’s two other founders, Seth Taylor and PC Zhu. After much debate, the trio’s solution was to take a wider, infrastructure and operations approach to supporting startup companies. They focused later in the biotech life cycle as they strived to create a profitable, sustainable business model.
With a new 124,000 square foot facility in Kendall Square, the company is also working on a much larger scale, with a headquarters in one the most coveted biotech locations in the world in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Between employers, contractors, and consultants, they now have around 80 people supporting the startups-in-residence. This includes everything from enterprise IT, intellectual property support, human resources, and an animal research facility managed by Charles River. It even has an internal IBC board that conducts ethics reviews.
The full-service model required significant investment. But the founders knew it needed to be large and different to succeed in this space.
“Most incubators and co-shared lab spaces are negative on the books, they usually lose money,” Chaudhuri said, adding that there are now over 200 incubators operating around the world.
The standard model relies heavily on government grants, subsidies, and corporate sponsorships. Or they have the backing of a major pharma company, such as Johnson & Johnson.
Mass Innovation Labs, on the other hand, is completely privately funded. Its founders reached out to the local investor community to raise the necessary funds. All three are well-connected and independently proven in the startup biotech game.
“It’s technically not public so I can’t give you an exact figure, but it was not a small sum. It was millions and millions of dollars, to be able do this,” Chaudhuri said.
“Just the security deposit on a space like this is almost 10 million dollars.”
Filling the space with highly talented residents didn’t prove difficult — the applicants were more or less self-selecting. The companies that needed to move fast were the most committed to trying to understand what the accelerator really did, Chaudhuri said.
“We’ve been approached by very successful, high potential companies.”
Chaudhuri maintains they have no formal selection criteria, but certain fields have aggregated in the space.
CRISPR Therapeutics was founded in the building. Editas went through its largest expansion phase in the facility, doubling in size and then going public in short-order. Gritstone Oncology is yet another success story, this time in the cancer space.
Another resident, TCR2 Therapeutics, officially exited stealth mode on Wednesday with a $44.5 million Series A.
The new class announced in Nov. 2016, includes EdiGene, Kernal Biologics, and Helix Nanotechnologies. Each will take advantage of the freshly launched “bench on demand” lab space program, a smaller-scale service targeted towards young startups.
The companies are different, but the fundamental question the founders hope to answer remains the same.
“How do you scale an opportunity and how do you get out of your own way when you’re in the middle of succeeding?”
Photo: Mass Innovation Labs
