Launch Labs
PHOTO/JACQUELYN GUTC
Justin Mih, founder of Matrigen Life Technologies, prepares plates that contain gel coating that will be packaged and shipped.
Throughout graduate school, Justin Mih heard excitement about changes in the field of biology.
“Everybody knows the future of biology is transitioning to soft biomaterials — it’s just that we’ve been talking about that for 20 years. It’s not happened yet.”
Mih said that when cells grow on gels, they act closer to how they would in the human body than when they’re in the common, plastic petri dish.
He got tired of waiting for someone else to create what seemed like an obvious, necessary solution of affordably coating the petri dishes with soft gel. So, after graduating from the Harvard School of Public Health, he set out to create the solution himself, launching Matrigen Life Technologies last July.
“I wanted to start right away with very limited capital,” he said. “I didn’t want to go out and look for venture capital. I wanted to do something that we would have enormous pressure on us to succeed.”
Relying on his own money and what he could gather from friends and family, Mih looked toward incubators.
Generally dedicated to startups in the biotech, software and alternative energy industries, incubators help new companies get off the ground, leasing out lab and office space while providing equipment and other support that may otherwise be impossible for an entrepreneur to afford.
“Incubators play a critical role in many businesses,” said Peter Marton, senior business advisor and technology specialist for the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center Network (SBDC) at Clark University. He said that’s because new businesses have so much to accomplish, including proving their technology, writing their business plans and refining their financial models, which incubators can assist with.
A Boost To Communities
He said incubators are not only beneficial to startups, but also the communities they’re in.
“First, they attract new ventures to the community itself. Ventures that might otherwise have started up in other locations are drawn to the support of the community and the incubator within that community,” he wrote in an email. “If a new venture has a positive experience in a community, it tends to remain and grow within that community, creating jobs and supporting the success of related ventures. Also, incubators help communities demonstrate that they are making a positive contribution to the development of the local economy, now and in the future.”
With Matrigen, Mih first looked at Cambridge and Boston, which are better known for their incubators. Then, a friend told him about Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives (MBI) in Worcester, where he met President and CEO Kevin O’Sullivan. Initially intending to move back to California within a few months of starting up, Mih gradually settled in Central Massachusetts, thanks to MBI.
“From the beginning, (O’Sullivan) was like, ‘You can do it.’ And I needed that. It was refreshing to hear that, because I had never heard that from anybody, coming from academia, especially,” Mih said. “You’re never encouraged to do this. You’re discouraged to do it. You’re encouraged to leave it in the hands of people who know what they’re doing and have been in the field for years.”
Giving credence to Mih’s statement, O’Sullivan said about 85 percent of the business that MBI receives comes from people with experience in the private sector.
Marton said half of his time at the SBDC is spent helping entrepreneurs work on business issues, while the other half is spent helping guide them through the personal transition of scientist or developer to business owner.
“Sometimes the scientist is not the right person to be the CEO,” he said. “It’s not uncommon for a scientist/founder to have to bring in someone to actually run the company” while they take on a role like head of technology and founder.
“If you don’t have the requisite skills to be the business leader, your business will fail” unless you bring someone else on board, he said. “The time during which a lot of that is figured out is while a firm is (at) an incubator.”
3 Of Every 4 Succeed
Most companies at MBI stay about 30 months, O’Sullivan said, adding that there is about a 75-percent success rate among the startups that fill most of the 230,000 square feet of lab and office space at its three locations.
“Half of my job is to keep all of these guys happy successful and get them out,” O’Sullivan said. “A success is when they leave and start on their own. We don’t enable people, we help them, but the goal is to make sure they get out on their own so they’re not dependent on us.”
Mih expects to be with MBI for at least another year. Matrigen has been selling its products since October and Mih now feels the company will survive.
Yumei Huang, president and CEO of CellMosaic, which develops chemical technologies for pharmaceutical and biotech companies as well as platform technologies, said moving out of an incubator is like graduating. She’s been with MBI since 2009 and expanded so much that she rents additional space from the owner of MBI’s Barber Avenue location.
Huang said that once she found out about MBI, she realized she could start her own company faster than she thought. She appreciates being able to network with other companies within the incubator. She also found MBI’s assistance with learning about human resources, 401(k) plans and accessing legal advice helpful as she started out.
“It saves a lot of time and effort,” she said.
Benefiting From Tufts’ Expertise
On a smaller scale, Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton launched the 4,000-sqaure-foot Tufts Biotechnology Transfer Center incubator in the late 1990s. Senior Campus Planner Jean Poteete said about 25 companies worked at the incubator, with up to three at a time filling the space, and staying as long as six years. Not only available to startups, the center is often used by subsidiaries of larger companies doing pre-clinical work.
“What would be an ideal startup for us is one that wants to be here because they would benefit from the close proximity of our veterinary hospital,” Poteete said.
Tom Keppeler, the school’s associate director of communications, said it’s an ideal location for researchers who need access to animals. A scientist working a cancer drug could try it on a dog that comes to the hospital with a tumor. And someone studying lung function could study a horse to examine a respiratory system that is close to a human’s.
Online Options
In our modern, virtual world, not all incubators are physical. Since last fall, the Institute for Energy & Sustainability in Worcester has offered a virtual incubator program. It’s assisted startups ADM-Live and Freight Farms.
“What we’re providing is business development resources,” said Christopher Noonan, senior program advisor.
Noonan works with the startups to develop strategies to make them known in Central Massachusetts, engage with partner networks and develop applications and proposals for funding.
ADM-Live, founded by Raghu Nandan in Westborough, aims to reduce paper waste and manual processing by making forms used by large companies and government entities into PDFs that can be filled out and processed on a computer network.
Connections Led To Deals
Nandan said his association with IES helped him gain new connections at universities and in state government, which have led to several possible deals and has removed the stress of marketing his product.
Summing up that relief that incubators provide startups, Sonia Patel, COO of Matrigen, said, “They give you kind of a piece of mind because they’ll take care of little things that you might not really even think about, like water bills and electricity bills. You don’t want to be worrying about little things like that; you’d rather just focus on getting your company off the ground.” n
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