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Many companies “graduate” from JLabs and go on to big-name partnerships. Photo: Paul Body

October 18, 2017 Comments (0) Views: 3062 Biotech, Blog, Hatch Blog, Startups

JLabs’ Impact on San Diego’s Innovation Community

The Johnson & Johnson biotech incubator started in San Diego. Here’s what it looks like five years later.

In April, we took you inside JLabs, Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s flagship biotech incubator on the Torrey Pines mesa. It was formed five years ago after changes within Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical division left its Janssen’s West Coast Research Center with quite a bit of vacant office space. Instead of filling that space itself, the company brought in local startups. JLabs now has seven incubators in the US and Canada with another on the way, and 312 startups call them home. About 40 of those startups are here in San Diego.

JLabs recently released a report detailing the impact the incubators have had on the innovation scene over the past five years. So far, JLabs companies have secured $9.4 billion. That’s even more impressive considering 30 percent of companies come in with less than $1 million in funding and 45 percent start with one or two employees.

Jeffery Stafford, president and CEO of San Diego-based biotech company Jecure, said in the JLabs: 5 Years of Innovation report: “Without bearing costly start-up expenses that can accompany a typical lab set-up, Jecure was able to conduct proof-of-concept experiments in a time frame that would be hard to imagine if the company had to establish an independent lab space elsewhere.”

Another interesting mention in the report is that JLabs has pro-diversity policies in place, such as not allowing companies to have all-male panels. In the life sciences field, less than 1 percent of CEOs are women and only 8 percent of STEM companies have minority ownership. At JLabs, 23 percent of companies have women CEOs and 18 percent are led by under-represented ethnic minorities, according to the report.

See more from the JLabs: 5 Years of Innovation report here.

 

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