BYOB (Bring Your Own Biotech): Lab Incubators Are Ready for Your Ideas

 

This story is part of our celebration of innovation in 2024.

 

by Dana D’Amico, Connect to Science

The North Texas campus of BioLabs, one of the biggest names in biotech wet lab co-working spaces around the world, is a shining star within Pegasus Park. The Pegasus Park development sprawls out onto 26 acres of land on the west side of Dallas. It’s land with a history. Former streambed to the nearby Trinity River before it was rerouted for flood control, this rich earth is now fuel for a different kind of ecosystem growth – the next national hub for cutting-edge biotechnology innovation.

As the biotech industry continues to navigate difficult economic waters into 2024, the view beyond remains a wide, open sea of possibility. Indeed, the life sciences are in the midst of a golden age of innovation fueled by nonstop breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, personalized medicine, gene editing, and more. The field is so brimming with ideas that the coastal hotspots of Boston and San Diego are no longer enough to hold it all.

Biotech incubators like BioLabs at Pegasus Park will serve as much-needed infrastructure for the next big wave of discovery, in cooperation with key innovation technology partners like Thermo Fisher Scientific, while emerging startups lead the way.

 

Building a Space for Ideas

There’s a common saying, often attributed to the philosopher Seneca, that argues “luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” In a field and marketspace where siloing is so easy and so counter to disruptive innovation, biotech incubators like Biolabs North Texas encourage the opposite to great result.

The first step is to construct a physical space capable of nurturing something intangible – tomorrow’s most exciting ideas in science. In the case of BioLabs Pegasus Park, it meant transforming a cinderblock skeleton with sky-high ceilings and an empty, in-ground oil pit dating back to the building’s prior life as a fuel distribution facility, to a network of bright spaces, clear lines-of-sight, and plenty of common spaces to encourage collaboration between researchers, community partners, industry experts, and more.

It’s a case of form creating function, in which designers aim to build people-first layouts that encourage the cross-pollination of ideas, ideas sparked over watercooler and water bath alike. Resident companies at various stages of growth use the facilities.

“We’ve got companies that are post series B, drug design, drug delivery companies, and then we have everything in between,” said director and site head of the Biolabs Pegasus Park office Gabby Everett, PhD, said.

Beyond the bench, the BioLabs building also plugs into a far wider ecosystem of businesses on campus. The nearby Pegasus Park Tower is home to the Water Cooler, a “social impact hub” that creates subsidized space for local university partners and nonprofits to gather for collaborative problem-solving. The Tower also hosts the business side of innovation – auditoriums for resident company meetings and presentations and the offices of potential investors, mentors and organizations like the entrepreneurship accelerator Health Wildcatters.

Onsite lounges offer space for holiday gatherings, catching up, and taking a break from the lab with a round of Goat Simulator or MarioKart^TM on the Nintendo Switch^TM. But the comradery built on the racetrack extends also to the things that really matter like tips for better workflows, better science, and collectively advancing a shared mission to bring world-changing technologies to market.

Consider early-stage biotech company BioLum Sciences, which became a resident of BioLabs in 2022. During routine lab interactions, a BioLum scientist and a neighboring resident scientist discovered a shared interest in peroxynitrite detection.

BioLum is pioneering precision assays for reactive species like peroxynitrite that are implicated as biomarkers in inflammatory, respiratory, and cardiovascular diseases. Alongside global partners, they aspire to enhance therapy discovery and development and ultimately translate these assays into clinical in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests for early detection.

“The potential diagnostic and therapeutic value of many biomarkers like peroxynitrite and nitric oxide (NO) has been underutilized due to lack of sensitive, selective detection methods,” said BioLum CEO Jack Reynolds.

The other resident was working with small molecules and realized their cellular models could really benefit from BioLum’s innovative assay. BioLums made it happen.

“Our serendipitous exchange not only bridged the gap between two geographically distant teams, but it also sparked more expansive research understandings in unexpected ways,” Reynolds said.

 

Bootstrapping Innovation from its Earliest Stages

BioLabs’ close partnership with companies like the site’s biggest sponsor Thermo Fisher Scientific also means that researchers at Pegasus Park have cost-effective access to cutting-edge instruments and wet lab technologies as soon as they hit the market – from closed, modular, GMP-compliant cell therapy instruments to AI-powered flow cytometry image analysis and beyond. Many of these instruments are designed to help researchers move their workflows seamlessly between R&D and scaled manufacturing, key for young companies seeking to build on their incubator discoveries after graduation.

 

 

Mark Federici leads Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Global Business Development for Bio-innovations group, which supports more than 40 lab incubator sites around the country.

“Our team goes out to talk to incubator owner-operators and others who are looking to open these shared spaces, sometimes in the early days before the building is even constructed,” said Federici.

“We work toward an understanding of how Thermo Fisher Scientific can enable their building and community – things like sponsoring instrumentation, installing on-site Supply Centers for everyday needs, providing commercial access to our commercial teams for enterprise-wide support, and bringing in our R&D scientists to deliver seminars on a regular basis.”

Access to cutting-edge instruments and wet lab space is one of the biggest selling points of the biotech incubator model because it de-risks innovation and drastically reduces the economic barriers to bringing new ideas to market.

Reynolds was a senior at Southern Methodist University attending an entrepreneurship club meeting when chemistry professor Alex Lippert and one of his students approached the group with an idea for an upcoming business plan competition at Texas Christian University.

Reynolds was up for the challenge; he and Lippert took their winning business plan on the competition circuit for the next two years and collected equity from investors along the way. Lippert is now the company’s CSO, and last year one of Lippert’s postdoctoral researchers Husain Kagalwala also began leading BioLum’s lab and technology development.

Despite a lean staff, BioLum took home a prestigious BioNTX Rising Star award this year. The incubator setting helps out small teams like BioLum’s with big ideas by putting the (expensive) tools in reach and making sure they know how best to use them.

“Vendors come in often to bring new technology, discuss what’s already available, and provide training and support on any equipment that we’re starting to use,” said Reynolds. “With these advanced instruments and so many cool features, it’s easy to miss extra functions beyond the ones you’re using daily. It helps when someone can show you that, so you can improve techniques by fully leveraging these state-of-the-art systems.”

The other draw of an incubator for residents is less tangible but equally vital: guidance on how to successfully bring a good idea to market beyond the bench, which includes navigating a complex regulatory and economic landscape that is foreign to many new scientist-entrepreneurs.

BioLabs is able to work with partners like Thermo Fisher Scientific and others to bring continuing education resources for residents to campus – everything from regulatory basics to seminars on trending topics in life science.

“We had the former Vice President of Regulatory Affairs for a major company come in to deliver an entire ‘Regulatory 101’ workshop,” said Everett. For early-stage companies, knowledge is power. “She discussed the FDA and submission fees and all sorts of things that brand new entrepreneurs and scientists might not yet know about but that they will need to navigate to progress.”

Tapping a Region’s Talent for Homegrown Innovations

Biotech innovation is an expensive and complex venture, and coworking models like Pegasus Park fill an immense need for Texas-based scientist-entrepreneurs and for the future of science at large.

Longtime residents of North Texas like Everett herself have always been aware of the diverse wellspring of life science talent native to the region, home to a diverse population that grows by one person every three minutes.

“If you look at the nearby University of Texas, Southwestern alone – it is one of the top universities and top medical institutions in the world for publishing in high-caliber scientific journals,” said Everett. “The North Texas and Dallas metroplex has 7.7 million people – more than live in all of Massachusetts. So as far as talent and workforce and incredible technology and science, we have all of that here.”

But even Everett was surprised at how deep that spring turned out to be, how much opportunity seems to have gone untapped without a local lab incubator to help develop home-grown innovation.

When the Pegasus Park Biolabs site first opened in 2022, Everett and her colleagues expected that if demand for residency matched coastal area locations, they would reach 15-20 percent capacity within the first year of business. Initial demand blew those estimates out of the water, and the site has already reached a buzzing 85 percent capacity.

“Looking back at UT Southwestern as a key example, they’ve spun out 80 companies in the past ten years – but none of those companies stayed here because the infrastructure wasn’t here,” said Everett.

Now, half of the site’s resident companies are local to Texas. The other half have travelled from out-of-state and settled in, creating a nice, regional melting pot of fresh ideas.

“It’s really exciting to have that kind of collision of companies, not just from different places, but also of all different sizes and developing a wide spectrum of technologies,” said Everett.

Reynolds agrees: “It’s cool to be able to walk across the hall for quick advice from a serial entrepreneur who has been there before, then bump into inspiring first-timers with fresh insights and outlooks.”

It makes sense that companies would flock here from all over the country, as the Dallas area boasts more than a few highly unique and biotech-friendly resources, including proximity to some of the nation’s largest R1 public research universities. Dallas Fort-Worth International Airport is also one of only two CEIV Pharma-certified airports in North America equipped with cold-chain cargo handling for safe processing of pharmaceuticals.

For many of these same reasons, the White House this year selected Pegasus Park as one of just three headquarters for the new federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which carries with it a budget of $2.5 billion for high-potential, high-impact research.

You may know the general ARPA model of disruptive innovation from its defense research origins in DARPA. DARPA’s research outcomes include such world-shifting technologies as the internet, GPS, and weather-forecasting satellites. ARPA-H will apply the same research approach to medical and biotech innovation, and Pegasus Park will be right at the center of it as the Customer Experience Hub.

BioLum is one of the newest “spoke” members of the ARPA-H Customer Experience Hub, a growing network connecting industry, academia, nonprofit, hospital, and other health ecosystem stakeholders. BioLum will contribute their specialized biomarker, assay, and synthetic expertise.

“We’re excited to explore opportunities to provide our services and technologies to other spoke groups,” said Reynolds. “ARPA-H is a big milestone and will really put Dallas on the map. Having a major federal program like this in the region will be key for incentivizing investors to move their capital here, as the region continues to deliver startup success stories that are hard to ignore.”

 

The future of innovation and what lies ahead for biotech in North Texas

BioLabs is already poised to expand its Pegasus Park site to accommodate companies like BioLum into graduation and beyond. Construction for Bridge Labs, a 135,000 square foot non-incubator extension to campus for growth-stage companies, is already underway.

Everett and BioLabs are also working on connecting local workers and students with all the opportunities expected to emerge from the exciting biotech sector in the North Texas metro in the next decade.

“We’re working with community colleges in the area to create these biotech certification programs and create that workforce that we know we’re going to need, because we’re attracting the companies but also the industry-adjacent service providers,” said Everett. “CROs, CDMOs, law firms, and recruiters are starting to look at Dallas and say, ‘I think we need to have an outpost here.’”

For leaders like Reynolds who are passionate about developing local connection, community involvement is as important as the lab work.

“We’re creating a ripple effect beyond our organization and into the communities we serve,” said Reynolds. “We have some exciting multi-disciplinary ideas that we’re looking forward to exploring with high school students this year. By integrating science into the community, we can enable a model of public health collaboration that has a more profound and inclusive impact.”

There’s truly something for everyone in the next wave of life science innovation.

“You don’t need a PhD to run a fermenter to produce antibodies. You need a specific skill set, a certification, and experience. We’re working across different groups to create that skilled workforce with experience and training,” said Everett.

As for what the next breakthrough will be – we can only watch and wait as all the pieces come together.

“We’re hoping to bring on some new employees early next year,” said Reynolds. “While our early offerings address cardiovascular, respiratory, inflammatory, neurological, and pain conditions, we want to broaden our assay lineup even further into other clinically-relevant biomarkers. We want to see our nitric oxide (NO) test become a routine part of annual physical checkups one day.”

Learn more about lab incubator setups with Thermo Fisher Scientific » 

 

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About Innovation at Thermo Fisher Scientific

In the field of life sciences, solving the world’s toughest problems is why we come to work each day. It’s what brings us together and empowers us to reach our true potential and work towards our collective goal of advancing science for the greater good.

That’s why Thermo Fisher Scientific has the largest R&D investment in the industry at $1 billion every year. Innovation is engraved into Thermo Fisher Scientific’s DNA, but it’s about more than developing novel technologies and products. Innovation is a mindset of iteration, evolution, and teamwork in science.

In 2024, join us in celebrating our customers – the true collaborative trailblazers who stay at the forefront of progress in a world where we need to innovate faster each day. Follow along as we explore why we are all in this journey together, at thermofisher.com/innovation.

 

 

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