BIOTECH SUPPORT: The Helix Center Biotech Incubator in St. Louis, launched in July 2012, is currently home to more than a dozen young biotech companies.ST. LOUIS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIPOn the second floor of a low-slung office building west of downtown Chicago, piles of boxes await unpacking as the final touches, such as the meeting room’s interactive SMART Board conferencing screen, are installed. In laboratories down the hall, fume hoods have been hung, benches wiped clean, and the autoclave put in place, ready for the building’s first tenants to begin their research. EnterpriseWorks Chicago is the newest of the University of Illinois’s business incubators, which offer cheap rent to entrepreneurs in the early stages of commercialization. At the new facility, enterprising life scientists can rent a desk in a shared office for $100 a month, and an additional $600 secures a spot in the wet lab. All members get access to the university’s library, facilities, and expertise.
EnterpriseWorks Chicago is one of a number of biotech incubators popping up across the country. According to the National Business Incubation Association (NBIA), the number of business incubators has grown by two orders of magnitude in the past three decades, with 1,250 US incubators supporting up-and-coming businesses in 2012, compared with only a dozen such facilities in 1980. More than a third of US incubators cater to technology firms, according to NBIA, and life-science incubators are popping up not just in established biotech clusters, such as Boston and San Diego, but also in emerging communities like Albuquerque and New Orleans. (See map below, and also “Biotech on the Bayou,” The Scientist, October 2010.)
Mark Long, the president of biotech consultancy Long Performance Advisors, characterizes the ...
