Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) has had a longtime, very active association to SBIR-involved firms. The corporation has acquired SEVEN SBIR awardees, TWENTY-FIVE SBIR-ers are in the portfolio of the Corporate VC entity and some FIFTY other SBIR awardees - past and present - have some sort of collaborative ad/or working relationship with J&J.
The shift of the J&J External Outreach activity to organize around the Innovation Centers has changed quite significantly the forms of working relationships. By far the most active of the Centers so far is in San Diego. The Boston facility opened in June 2013 at One Cambridge Center - at about the same time as the UK London Innovation Center.
Of the THREE firms mentioned in this article, Riparian is the only one SBIR-involved. Based on previous history, one can expect that there wil be more.
Date: May 19, 2014 Author: Don Seiffert Source: bizjournals (
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Janssen Labs, an incubator for life science startups run in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson, has awarded three local start-ups $50,000 each to become a part of Janssen Labs @LabCentral for one year.
XTuit Pharmaceuticals, Cyteir Therapeutics and Riparian Pharmaceuticals were announced last week on stage at the House of Blues in Boston during the New England Venture Capital Association NEVY awards.
"Our goal is to improve the investment profile of life science companies by drastically reducing the cost and time to market," said Melinda Richter, head of Janssen Labs' three sites in San Diego, San Francisco and Cambridge . "What started as an experiment has evolved into a proven, comprehensive model that is expanding. Ultimately, success is to bring more solutions to patients that need them."
Founded in 2011 by Harvard professor Rakesh Jain, MIT professor Bob Langer and Polaris partner and serial entrepreneur Alan Crane, XTuit is developing cancer therapies that target the tumor microenvironment, an approach that could potentially overcome issues associated with delivering drugs to tumors. The company received $1.5 million in seed funding that is being used for IND-enabling studies
Cyteir is working on a therapeutic platform based on genomic instability in a cell. It has developed a proprietary screening platform that can quickly return potential drug targets with specific, selective and defined bioactivity. The startup was founded in June of 2012 based on technology developed at The Jackson Laboratory. Its founders are associate professor at the Jackson Laboratory, Kevin Mills; former chair of the Jackson Laboratory Board of Trustees, David Shaw; and industry veteran Tim Romberger.
Riparian received a small business grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to begin high throughput screening using a technology to identify compounds that reduce vascular inflammation. The startup is trying to find drugs that treat the underlying cause of heart attacks and strokes. There is no existing therapy for vascular inflammation. It was cofounded by a Harvard-educated biomedical engineer, Will Adams, and associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, Guillermo Garcia-Cardena, an expert in the vascular biology of cardiovascular disease.
Janssen Labs now hosts a total of 53 life science companies across its three incubators located in San Diego, San Francisco (Janssen Labs @QB3) and Boston (Janssen Labs @LabCentral). Janssen Labs in San Diego, the first of the three, opened its doors in January 2012. The lab at One Cambridge Center in Cambridge opened last June.
