The following is an excerpt from an article published in The Boston Globe on Tuesday, August 13, 2024:
The building will also house a biotech incubator for 12 to 15 promising startups that employ another 200 workers. This will be the fourth of Lilly’s so-called Gateway Labs (there are two in South San Francisco and one in San Diego), which create opportunities for fledgling biotechs to collaborate with Lilly scientists.
Four biotechs have started moving into the building or plan to later this year: Tevard Biosciences, Amplitude Therapeutics, FireCyte Therapeutics, and Solu Therapeutics. They pay rent to Lilly for their laboratories, which feature impressive views of the Boston skyline.
Daniel Fischer, cofounder and chief executive of Tevard, said during a tour of the incubator Tuesday that working in the same building as Lilly scientists can foster collaboration through the oft-mentioned “bump factor” — the chance to bump into other scientists and discuss what they are working on. Nonetheless, he said, Tevard will operate independently of Lilly and maintain ownership of its intellectual property.
Tevard’s lead drug program encompasses potential treatments for genetic forms of epilepsy, including Dravet, a rare and catastrophic type that afflicts Fisher’s 15-year-old daughter. (Tevard is Dravet spelled backward because the company wants to reverse the condition.)
Lilly has long had a relatively small workforce among the 18 big biopharma companies with a presence in Massachusetts. Kendalle Burlin O’Connell, chief executive and president of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council trade group, said that Lilly’s expansion in Fort Point “is a testament to what we already know: We are the best place in the world for research and development.”
It’s also a testament to the growth of Boston — particularly the Seaport District and neighboring areas — as an alternative to Kendall Square for housing drug companies. In the 10 years since Vertex Pharmaceuticals moved from Cambridge to a sprawling complex on the waterfront, the Seaport has attracted companies such as Alexion Pharmaceuticals (the rare disease unit of the British-Swedish drug maker AstraZeneca), CRISPR Therapeutics, Servier Pharmaceuticals, Foundation Medicine, and others.