The University of Pennsylvania’s startup incubator is getting a boost from a big pharmaceutical company.
Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson said Tuesday that it had made a deal with the university to launch the JPOD @ Philadelphia, within the school’s Pennovation Center, an incubator that has existed for two years, as part of its JLABS initiative.
The goal of the program is to identify and accelerate the development of early-stage healthcare businesses from the Philadelphia region’s life science industry in areas like pharmaceuticals, medical devices, consumer and health technologies. The initiative will support startup entrepreneurs with training, mentoring and networking programs. The Pennovation Center includes a secure telecommunications conferencing system that connects regional innovators to the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Network. JLABS will also launch the JPOD @ Philadelphia QuickFire Challenge, a competition in which individuals or teams will be awarded with funding to accelerate their innovations.
Collaborations between the private sector and academia that drive innovation and entrepreneurship are nothing new, as large technology and biotechnology ecosystems in Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle and elsewhere attest.
Earlier this year, the non-profit New York City Economic Development Corporation announced the $500 million LifeSci NYC initiative to establish the city as a leader in life sciences. The investment included $100 million for a life sciences campus and $50 million to expand the city’s existing academic research centers, and plans to launch an advisory council on life sciences for the mayor that would include experts from academia, industry, philanthropy and finance. Meanwhile, Seattle has seen collaboration between the city’s life sciences and technology sectors. These include an effort by Adaptive Biotechnologies, a spin-off from the academic Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, to use the Azure could computing technology of Microsoft, based in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, Washington, to develop a digitized map of the human immune system.
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