Bioscience startups have a million-dollar problem…

Bioscience startups have a big challenge:

How to do research, testing, and product dev on a budget. This means they often can’t access well-outfitted lab space and top-tier equipment.

Of course, established multinational companies with eight-figure research budgets can build their own labs and buy all the nice science toys they want. But bioscience startups without big levels of funding are left out in the cold.

Part of our core mission is to make cutting-edge bioscience accessible to startups. Here’s Yash Sabharwal from NanoMedical, one of our member companies:

Today, I want to give you a glimpse of how we equip our member companies.

First, all companies at ABI have access to core labs, bench space, conference space, and a break area. We’re also fully stocked with $1.7M of best-in-class equipment and instrumentation that allows our startups to research, test, and develop your product—and explore emerging science. All of this includes 24-hour card access on the beautiful ACC Highland campus in Austin.

Second, we handle the infrastructure needs for all our startups including power, water, and city wastewater restrictions — a major concern they no longer need to worry about.

You can peruse the full equipment list here, but you’ll find that it includes:

• General Lab Equipment: Balances, water baths, spectrophotometers, gel docs, thermal cyclers, microcentrifuges.
• Cold Storage: 4⁰C refrigeration, -20⁰C freezers, -80⁰C freezers.
• Light and Fluorescence Microscopy
• Cell Culture Facility 
• High-Speed Centrifugation
• Specialized Analytical Instruments: LC-MS, flow cytometer, NGS, FPLC, GC and much more.
• Infrastructure: DI water throughout, RO water systems, 220V power, backup generator, autoclave.
• Safety Equipment: eye washes, safety showers, fire extinguishers.

In addition, I’ll draw your attention to our clean rooms. Access to clean room space by the month is a very unique offering, and we have two of them!

Clean Rooms

We have two ISO8 (Class 100,000) clean rooms for lease, providing an environment free from dust and contaminants. These rooms could be used to manufacture a medical device or even a drug for an animal trial. Each clean room has a gowning room and access to gasses piped directly into the space via specialized plumbing. These are 400-square-foot private spaces, not shared with other companies. One of our incubator companies, ClearCam, who I mentioned two emails ago, manufactured their surgical camera cleaner in one of these clean rooms.

If you have a great bioscience idea or a prototype product, we want you to focus on developing it and getting it to market, not worrying about how to fit a freezer or a lab bench in your home garage next to your kids’ bikes.

Ready to get started?

Apply now to join the ACC Bioscience Incubator.

Nancy Lyon

ACC Bioscience Incubator Director