News
THE NEXT BIOTECH SUPERSTAR
May 1, 2012
| A friendly neighborhood broker recently tipped us off to the fact Exton now has an entrepreneurial incubator space for tech and biopharmaceutical startups. So empty your medicine cabinets and fire up the Bunsen burners. |
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| The Innovation Center at Eagleview is in the same corporate business park as the Chester County Economic Development Council, which was instrumental in getting the project off the ground, says Stacy Martin of the Hankin Group, which owns the property. It sits inside Exton's Keystone Innovation Zone and will be formally announced to the public sometime this week. The 40k SF single-story freestanding lab building was originally built for Johnson & Johnson (back when No More Tears was the hot thing that all the cool babies were using.) The building had been sitting empty and unused for quite some time before Hankinrealized it was a potentially perfect fit for some of the area's smaller life-science startups. "I was looking at it and thinking to myself, 'There's not a lot of larger lab tenants out there at 40k SF,'" Stacy says. "But the building does lend itself to being divided up for tenants." |
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| The ICE is "similar but different" to the incubator spaces located at, say, the University City Science Center, which offers more services and certainly has more funding than ICE. "The idea is that a startup or a young company can lease small lab and office space for a short term, at a below-market rate," she says. (She assures us that evil cartoon supervillians looking for lab space generally have to pay above market rate, which is another way the CRE industry is keeping us safe.) |
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| And while the ICE labs don't come complete with equipment, basic supplies such as chem hoods and benches are provided. There's also a reception area and a fully-equipped conference room for tenants to share, as well as other basics like telephone and Wi-Fi. The building's first tenant, a biopharma company known as TransSig, has already moved in, and Stacy tells us she's in talks with a number of other startups. A ribbon-cutting is tentatively scheduled for the second week of June. |
