Mass Innovation Labs Host Space for Growing Biotech

By Christina Phillips

August 19, 2016 | “Something that the industry doesn’t really talk about is the cost of doing research,” says Amrit Chaudhuri, CEO of Mass Innovation Labs in Cambridge, Mass. Running a lab can cost hundreds of dollars per square foot, Chaudhuri says, but Mass Innovation Labs offers an alternative.

The commercial rental space for research in biology and chemistry helps small startups in biopharma accelerate their research while sharing overhead costs with other groups. The lab provides equipment, technology, and operational support to reduce costs and time investment. This allows smaller startups to nimbly and effectively carry out early research that is essential for larger development.

Mass Innovation Labs has 124,000 square feet of lab space in East Cambridge, just blocks from Kendall Square and the offices of big pharma, the Broad Institute, and MIT. The Labs currently have 9 company tenants, and provide ethics review as a member of the Cambridge Institutional Biosafety Committee for genetic research. The Labs also provide IT, employee training, security, and lab repurposing.

Chaudhuri identifies several big hurdles for start-ups in biopharma: time, cost, and access to infrastructure. “If you look at academia, [if] you’re a professor who’s running a lab at Columbia or Harvard, it costs hundreds of dollars per square foot,” he says, noting that universities provide a place for professors to conduct research, but the university keeps the IP. “In pharma, you’re spending $200-$400 a square foot in operational costs to enable really high quality research in the industry setting.”

For start-ups, he says it takes anywhere from five to twelve months to build a lab, get the lab permitted, build an operations team, and being research. “This is a really big hurdle for most companies,” Chaudhuri says. “We’ve built lab [space] that we have complete control over in terms of reorganizing and repurposing. We’ve taken chemistry facilities and turned them into wet labs or turned them into tissue cultures.” Mass Innovation Labs provides the departmental staff who problem solve for a wide variety of genetic research hurdles

“We think the access to infrastructure in the industry is broken,” Chaudhuri says. “Research is only getting faster and changing faster. What is the standard today may be completely different in three or four years.” Larger pharmaceutical companies, he notes, have the money and the access to resources to adjust to these changes, but smaller, cash-strapped companies are less able to adapt. “What we built was an environment that provided pharma research operations for independent companies. We provide an economy of scale and access to resources that most independent small companies wouldn’t build up for themselves. So what we did is basically take a model that worked in pharma and made it modular and workable for lots of co-located groups.”

Mass Innovation Lab provides several options for start up companies, including access to wet labs, mammalian labs, and biosafety level 1 and 2 ready suites that support anywhere from two to one hundred scientists. “Early stage research is risky, and it’s not grant funded, and it's not funded by big pharma,” Chaudhuri says. “We’re trying to build an alternative method that is, from a timing perspective, capital perspective, and operational perspective, more effective for the nimble need of startups.”

Several startups supported by the lab have found rapid success. For example, Chaudhuri says Imagen Biopharma, a developer of biological therapeutics in immune-oncology, has hit two and three year milestones in as little as eight months.