Accelerators and Incubators

Over the past few years, startup accelerators and incubators have been popping up all over the country.  Whether it's Y Combinator on the west coast or NYCSeedStart in Manhattan, these programs all follow a pretty standard format: they provide early-stage entrepreneurs with co-located work space, mentorship, and seed funding in exchange for a small equity-stake in the new company.  As one would expect, the vast majority of these incubators focus on tech or media startups that have low capital requirements. 

Most recently, Sandbox Industries announced the founding of Healthbox, a healthcare-focused incubator that will launch next year.  To be clear, Healthbox will most certainly focus on healthcare IT or service-based offerings.  While it would be great to see the formation of life sciences incubators, I won't hold my breath.   The capital-intensive requirement alone make it a difficult proposition.  Additionally, the highly specialized lab space and technology requirements make it unlikely that an incubator could properly support a group of companies. 

This of course begs the question(s) - what can be done to help early-stage life sciences  during their proof of concept and pre-clinical stages?  How can innovative life sciences firms be better at showing early results without burning through piles of cash - particularly dilutive equity?  Or more importantly, how do we continue to bridge the relationship between academic research and product commercialization? Over the next few weeks, I'll dive into some of the major drivers/issues of launching a life sciences startup.