When Dr. Gary Niehaus came to Ohio in 1985, the entire region was in a slump. The so-called “Rust Belt” had lost its traditional manufacturing base, but failed to replace it with anything nearly so substantial. The midwest was still home to several research universities that consistently attracted the best and the brightest from across the country and around the world. But for the most part, the best and brightest then went elsewhere to innovate.

At that time, there was a chasm between the academic and commercial worlds. As Dr. Niehaus explains, the general feeling was that the academic’s role was to pursue research and contribute to a “body of literature.” The dirty work of finding practical applications for this research—by creating a product or business that would move those findings out into the marketplace—was best left to the business majors.

This divide began to shrink in the early 1990s with the rapid spread of business incubators. These fertile startup spaces helped academics begin to take pure research and transform it into usable products and services. The leap from research to viable businesses has only become easier since then, as computer science and electrical engineering have grown more product focused. Wall Street has become more interested in business developed from research.

But even 30 years later, Dr. Niehaus points out, there are few business people with enough medical or bioscience background to similarly bridge the gap between the biotech lab and the marketplace. If we want research to actually improve lives, we need to foster an ecosystem of biotech incubators that can help academics get their work out of the lab and into the world, in the same way that business incubators moved DoorDash, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit from geeky flights-of-fancy to household names.

Bridging the Gap Between Research and the Marketplace

Dr. Niehaus is professor emeritus of Integrative Medical Sciences at Northeast Ohio Medical University. He now directs special projects at Crystal Diagnostics, a technology company focused on food safety testing and foodborne pathogen detection. Dr. Niehaus was fortunate: when Northeast Ohio Medical University launched their biotech incubator, the REDIzone, they did so literally at his doorstep, just outside the office he’d occupied for more than a decade.

“Incubators like the REDIzone are really helping scientists who have absolutely no business background begin to get an idea of how you move forward in developing a company to commercialize new and unique ideas,” Dr. Nierhaus explains. As he’s noted before, “There are not a lot of business people that have the background to be able to do that. And I think a lot of incredibly important research has not been tapped into to be able to create approaches that improve health, [and] the general well being of the public in general…The incubators were a fantastic invention to move things out of the university into actual application. … This is how we can begin to retrain everyone and create new industries that take advantage of the new directions that research could go in.”

Develop Biotech Incubator Connections with Priorclave

Most of the value in a traditional tech-centric business incubator arises from the opportunity to make connections and network. As such, the facility itself can be little more than some office space with open desks and good wifi. But a biotech incubator needs to offer more. At the REDIzone, for example, startups have access to office space, as well as wet labs with all the requisite resources and equipment (e.g., centrifuges, autoclaves, sinks and eye wash stations, etc.) The REDIzone has proven invaluable in Dr. Niehaus’s pursuit of greater food supply chain safety, as this work requires handling pathogenic samples, and the REDIzone gives access to safety oversight resources, autoclaves for safe pathogen disposal, and so on.

Priorclave is pleased to work with small labs, startups, biotech incubators, and CROs, outfitting them with autoclave sterilizers that help them put their time and effort where it counts—into research (instead of equipment maintenance). We support every autoclave we deliver with unparalleled free lifetime technical support. Contact us whenever you’re ready to discuss properly equipping your lab.