Hyde Park Labs to open incubator for life science startup companies | Evening Digest | hpherald.com

The second phase of the U. of C.’s decades-long Harper Court expansion, Hyde Park Labs broke ground this winter and has confirmed its first operator: CIC.

Formerly the Cambridge Innovation Center, CIC will manage and operate 20,000 square feet of lab and office space in the building. Located on the fifth floor of Hyde Park Labs, the CIC facility will primarily cater to the startup companies of U. of C. faculty, “helping to extend the impact of their research, discoveries, and intellectual property,” according to the university.

CIC Labs, an initiative of CIC, was launched in 2014 to support the life sciences — the study of living organisms and life processes, such as biology. The Hyde Park facility will be the company’s third U.S.-based wet lab and its ninth international location. Around the globe, CIC operates more than one million square feet of innovation campuses which have shared workspace, wet labs and event space.

Katie Lettie, an associate director on CIC’s expansion team and a U. of C. graduate, described the company’s offerings as an “all-inclusive lab management platform.”

“It enables them to take advantage of all this shared equipment that’s on site, the staff that we would have on site, who have extensive experience in research and lab management,” Lettie said. “Often, when you’re at this early stage in your research, one of the challenges around finding the right kind of space is that the act of having to lease space — which is a long-term commitment — build your lab, get it permitted, buy all of the equipment, is hugely costly.”

Tenants rent the space month-to-month; it’s open to faculty members and the public.

“What CIC does is we actually break down some of the barriers to those companies going from the university into commercial space by enabling them to do so on a flexible basis, at a much, much lower cost,” Lettie said. “We have the consumables they need … And they can scale (lab use) up or scale it down as their research is successful or not.”