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Incubating the Future with Medace for Biotech Startups

Written by | Published: 09.27.2023

Biotechnology tends to seem like the sort of industry that does not have room for small players. The facilities required to work with biological products with scientific precision and purity are not the sort of thing one can expect to assemble from second-hand parts in a suburban garage. For small operations with big ideas, this would seem like an insurmountable barrier. For Kurt Gielen of Medace, this was instead an opportunity.

Kurt Gielen is the Chief Business Officer of Medace, a combination co-working space and shared laboratory for biotechnology innovation operating in Belgium. Their goal is to provide clean rooms, lab benches, and other facilities that aspiring biotechstartups can use to explore, develop, refine, and even manufacture their offerings well before they have the resources to do so entirely in-house. By making these resources available on an as-and-when-needed basis, Medace lowers the barrier to entry for biotechnology startups and enables them to bring their inventions to market earlier and less expensively than they ever could on their own. Medace also offers its expertise in regulatory compliance and quality control to help their clients develop their products and business models to the point that they can stand on their own, without continuing to rely on Medace. It’s an innovative strategy, taking cues from the information-technology industry’s startup incubators and similar programs for cultivating the next generation of ideas and products, and it also fits with how Gielen found his way to Medace.

Gielen, like many people who initially aimed or a life in academia, found that the laboratory was not a good fit for him. He remained connected to biotechnology, however, first by working in sales for biotech firms and later by helping found Medace. Gielen’s education helped make clear that many interesting ideas in biotechnology wither on the proverbial vine because of how difficult it is to develop them, within or outside academia, not because they lack merit or because their creators aren’t interested. Medace formed to address that need and create a space where biotechnology ventures whose pockets are not (yet) deep can still try to make their mark on the world and bring cutting-edge science to fruition. Gielen and the rest of the people running Medace hope to bring their model of biotechnology product development to other cities and countries, lowering barriers to innovation along the way.

Kurt Gielen has thoughts on everything from the books that might inform other biotechnology entrepreneurs to the many stops his life took on his way to Medace. Learn more about this biotechnology innovator and his quest to make biotechnology and clinical manufacturing more accessible to more people in our podcast.

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