NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, or QB3, continues to grow its family of startups housed at its incubators within San Francisco's Mission Bay campus, Douglas Crawford, QB3's director of industry alliances and associate executive director, told GenomeWeb Daily News.
The total number of tenants has risen from the 16 reported at the end of 2009, to the current 18. Of those, five are within the 2,500-square-foot incubator space known as "The Garage," while 13 are within 8,000 square feet of a 10,000-square-foot space one block east — a section of FibroGen's headquarters at 409 Illinois St., the 239,000-square-foot building to which the developer of recombinant collagen and gelatin for medical device and pharmaceutical uses, relocated its headquarters more than a year ago.
"We continue to see one to two new companies a month move into that [Fibrogen] space, which is just extraordinary to see that kind of vitality at the entry level of the biotech industry. We're very happy to sere that," Crawford said in an interview.
In addition, QB3 said today that Zcube, the research corporate venture of Italian pharmaceutical firm Zambon, has joined the Mission Bay Capital Fund — QB3's first venture fund — with a $1 million investment. Zcube is the only European company to contribute to the Mission Bay Capital Fund to date, QB3 said in a statement.