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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowAt IBJ’s Life Sciences Power Breakfast this week, Indiana University announced several partnerships meant to boost the impact its new IU Launch Accelerator for Biosciences, known as IU LAB, will have on making Indiana a hot spot of life sciences innovation.
You can read the full details in this week’s Focus section, but the upshot is that IU will partner with Gener8tor, a Madison, Wisconsin-based startup accelerator, to run a pre-accelerator program for early-stage startups that have an idea but not yet a viable product. It is also partnering with San Jose, California-based venture capital firm Plug and Play and the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership for an accelerator for startups that have a potentially viable product, have demonstrated initial market traction and are preparing for fundraising.
And IU LAB, which is based at 16 Tech Innovation District, announced that its accelerator programs will now be called IU Health Incubator at IU LAB, thanks to a $4.5 million, three-year sponsorship deal with IU Health.
The moves come as Indiana is doubling down on efforts to build up the state’s life sciences sector. That might not seem necessary. Already, Indiana is home to major life sciences companies that include Eli Lilly and Co., Cook Group, Roche Diagnostics, Elanco Animal Health and Corteva Agriscience, and it has a growing number of emerging biotech firms, including MBX Biosciences (which recently went public).
But despite those prominent companies, Indianapolis doesn’t consistently land on lists of the nation’s hottest life sciences hubs. Boston leads most of those lists, and other cities that show up frequently include San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.
Those rankings are typically based in part on National Institutes of Health funding, venture capital investments, patents, lab space and life sciences employment. And so the work that Indiana University Indianapolis, 16 Tech and Purdue University are doing to increase available lab space, commercialize research and encourage venture funding in those efforts is key to putting the Indianapolis region on the life sciences map.
And we think there is opportunity.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the Trump administration’s freeze of $2.26 billion in federal grants and contracts comes as the region’s biotechnology sector is “already struggling with layoffs and a downturn in venture-capital investment following a frenzied expansion during and right after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Of course, all universities are facing uncertainty about federal funding and grants. But because Indiana hasn’t been so dependent on those dollars for building up its life sciences sector, it might be able to forge a new path—and that might give emerging companies, innovators and researchers a more affordable place to do business.
Already, the Lilly Endowment is the major funder—at $138 million—behind the six-floor, 150,000-square-foot IU LAB expected to open in 2027. And in 2024, it became the nation’s top life sciences exporter, generating more than $99 billion in economic activity, according to industry advocate BioCrossroads.
Leaders in Indiana—particularly central Indiana—need to stay focused on these efforts, which offer great opportunity for economic expansion.•
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I hate to bring up the obvious, but one of the main reasons that the real biotech hubs are the medical schools that are associated with those areas. For example, there are four medical schools in Boston – Harvard Medical School; Tufts University School of Medicine; Boston University School of Medicine and the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine, or one hour outside of Boston. Indiana has only one “research” medical (allopathic) school and one osteopathic medical school. All of our surrounding states have more of both. Even Kentucky has two research medical schools. When is our State going to wake up???
Phillip D. Toth, MD, FACP