The region’s innovation district – the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus – continues to drive discovery and entrepreneurship through the co-location of growing companies, health care entities, research organizations, and academia. More than 16,000 students, researchers, doctors, business leaders, and innovators come to work every day on the BNMC, providing the perfect environment to create unique connections and collaboration.
Here’s a quick look at what’s happening right now on the Medical Campus:
- The University at Buffalo’s Innovation Hub celebrated a major milestone this spring with the grand opening of its new Incubator and Co-Work Space designed to help early-stage entrepreneurs turn their ideas into profitable ventures. In addition to full-service office space making it as easy as possible for companies to focus on their core business, UB has highly in demand rental wet lab space available. The new incubator is filling up as pandemic guidelines change, and currently houses UB spin-outs like Garwood Medical Devices and Real Talk, as well as 43N winner HelixIntel.
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The Jacobs Institute’s Idea to Reality Center (i2R) is the only one-stop shop for medical device development. The JI team’s i2r process leads entrepreneurs, start-ups, emerging and mature companies through targeted programs, services and innovations - from an idea to reality with prototyping, development, redesign, simultaneous physician feedback, engineer testing, regulatory guidance, and more, with cutting-edge vascular and regulatory expertise that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
- Continuing 65 years of innovation, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute has established a Cryo-EM Center. Cryo-EM (cryo-electron microscopy) is an important tool for drug discovery – it helps find better and safer drugs. HWI’s newest center provides access for WNY and beyond to expert staff, state-of-the art laboratories and instrumentation, purpose-built facilities, convenient scheduling and remote access as needed. Take a sneak peek!
Bonus innovation at HWI – To help ensure a consistent and reliable supply of energy for the Center, HWI created a first-of-its-kind battery storage device that will be integrated with its building automation system and will charge itself during off-peak hours. In addition, the developers of the system and HWI will be working with the microscope manufacturer to see if the ‘clean’ electric coming off of the battery will improve the performance of the electron microscopes.
- This spring, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center announced a multi-year partnership with BridgeBio Pharma to advance development of investigational therapeutics for patients with genetically driven cancers. This increases available resources and expands Roswell’s network of expertise in enabling a quicker pathway from “bench to bedside” in areas such as genetics, bioinformatics and molecular biology.
- Athenex, a UB spin-out currently headquartered in the Conventus building, recently acquired Kuur, a Texas biopharmaceutical firm. Kuur uses the cells of healthy donors to make cancer therapies, not the patient’s own cells as is more common. In addition, Athenex is adding a cell therapy manufacturing center in Conventus and anticipate construction wrapping up on its new 320,000 square foot manufacturing center in Dunkirk in Q4.
