Leaders working to establish a high-tech incubator for promising bioscience startups and other companies in Lawrence insist that the effort will take money, solid planning and – perhaps more than anything else – cooperation from Kansas University.

And folks atop Mount Oread say they’re on board.

“We want to take advantage of those opportunities,” said Carey Novak, director of business relations and development for the KU Center for Research Inc. “We want to see if we can get something in place.”

Officials from the Lawrence-Douglas County Biosciences Authority say they expect to have a proposed “model” ready within three months for accomplishing what already has been in the discussion stage for more than three years: opening a “wet lab” incubator – a description for high-tech scientific spaces capable of accommodating specialized research – designed to accomplish several objectives:

¢ Take products created through basic research at KU and steer them toward the commercial market.

¢ Accommodate other startup companies in Lawrence that may be looking for more space, specialized equipment or other support to speed efforts toward commercialization.

¢ Welcome companies or research efforts from elsewhere that want to collaborate with KU scientists and researchers, with the goal of creating products or services that need work on the way to market.

Implicit in all scenarios, of course, is that Lawrence would be able to nurture, retain and gain jobs that promise high wages, attract significant investments and fuel potential for rapid growth.

An ‘evolutionary’ center

All would be within a single physical location and include support from many directions, from high-tech equipment to office support to business plan development and on and on.

“It could accommodate multipurpose uses,” said LaVerne Epp, chairman of the Lawrence-Douglas County Biosciences Authority. “It could accommodate ‘bridge’ companies. It could accommodate startup companies as well as a company that’s already in existence that we may recruit through KU research.

“This is going to be a very evolutionary type of center.”

The authority is looking at several potential configurations and locations, Epp said.

Among them is the former Oread Inc. Bulk Actives Pilot Plant, a former production center for small batches of drugs that has since been transformed into high-tech lab space now occupied by two growing life-sciences companies: Deciphera Pharmaceuticals and CritiTech.

Deciphera is set to leave the center for a larger building that it is purchasing in the East Hills Business Park, as part of a plan brokered and lent financial assistance by the authority and its partners: the city of Lawrence, Douglas County and the Kansas Bioscience Authority.

Space available

Once Deciphera relocates – expected to be sometime in 2008 – CritiTech would expand its operations but still leave about 15,000 square feet of the building’s nearly 20,000 square feet of space available for use as a potential incubator at 4950 Research Park Way.

Sam Campbell, CritiTech’s chief executive officer and general partner for the group that owns the West Lawrence Laboratories building, said that opening up space for another Deciphera-type operation simply made sense.

“The whole idea is to have companies do exactly that – to grow out of space and into their own location,” said Campbell, who remains confident that CritiTech’s work on improving specific cancer-fighting drug formulations could lead CritiTech to outgrow its space in the coming years.

“There will be a good opportunity to get that space completely full and producing the kinds of companies we want,” he said.

But any incubator would be about more than a building, some fume hoods and a collection of lab tables, said Matt McClorey, CEO of the Lawrence Regional Technology Center and member of the local authority’s board of directors. Any incubator also needs to consider providing tenants with lease subsidies, business development services or even equipment loans.

Epp said that taking care to consider all such opportunities would be key to the center’s success.

“It’s not just a real estate deal,” he said.

Lavern Squier, president and CEO of the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, considers the concept to be a “service center,” while Bob Johnson, a fellow authority director and chairman of the Douglas County Commission, said that such an operation would see its best chance of success by working closely with the community’s biggest asset in relation to bioscience connections.

That’s right: KU.

“The building is terribly important,” Johnson said, “but it’s not always the most important.”