At an event that featured the CEO of Johnson & Johnson, a member of Congress, the president of Rutgers, the chief operating officer of the state and key leaders at the state’s two biggest health systems, a prominent Jerseyan who wasn’t in the building — and a well-known Jersey locale — managed to steal the show.
Or at least they gave Portal Innovations Founder and CEO John Flavin his best line Tuesday at the ribbon-cutting of the New Jersey Innovation Hub, powered by Portal, in New Brunswick.
Flavin told the crowd about a young entrepreneur, “a rock star named Bruce,” who got his start at an incubator called the Stone Pony.
“He played the small crowds there, but eventually his voice was heard around the world,” Flavin said. “When you look around you today, that’s who we are. We’re the Stone Pony of biotech.”
The line works.
The hub is a 30,000-square-foot life sciences incubator in H-1, the first building in the HELIX innovation district. It gives early-stage founders a small room to play: lab space, seed capital, mentoring and an introduction to Portal’s national network of investors and pharma partners. The idea is that they get good before they take the act on the road.
The bigger aim is to help New Jersey reaffirm its spot as the hot spot for life sciences innovation in the country and around the world.
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Flavin knows how hard the small rooms can be.
Before starting Chicago-based Portal, he spent two decades building biotech companies, starting with one he founded with his brother. He said investors had plenty of reasons to say no.
“We don’t invest in you. You’re too young. You don’t have any gray hair. We don’t invest in brothers,” he recalled hearing. “I’m sorry, but we don’t invest in biotechnology companies in Chicago. We’ve got to be in Boston or in San Francisco.”
Flavin doesn’t buy it.
“You can build biotechnology companies anywhere if you have the right ingredients,” he said.
In his view, that means strong academic and medical institutions on one end, and large companies that can carry an idea through the FDA and to patients on the other.
New Jersey has both, Flavin said.
“We want to be the watering hole in the ecosystem,” he said. “You’ve got the large trees. You’ve even got a forest.
“It’s the medicine chest of the world, as we all know.”
Portal’s job, he said, is to provide “the seeds that become saplings that grow into trees.”
Flavin said the hub has 21 member companies. That’s up from 16 when it opened to members in July, according to the company.
There’s money behind the effort, too. In August, the N.J. Economic Development Authority board approved up to $5 million for a Portal-managed fund to invest in hub companies. RWJBarnabas Health is matching it with $5 million of its own.
Congressman Frank Pallone (D) promised to push for more, too.
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Flavin gave much of the credit for Portal’s arrival to Chris Paladino, president of the New Brunswick Development Corp.
DEVCO is the master developer of HELIX, a three-building, 1.6 million-square-foot innovation district in the heart of New Brunswick. And Paladino is what you called a persistent president.
Flavin said Portal “kept getting calls from this guy in New Jersey.”
Paladino had a slightly different version.
“All those phone calls were not answered,” he said, drawing laughs. He said DEVCO eventually tracked Flavin down at the BIO International Convention and chased him around at brunch until they had a chat.
Paladino said that kind of persistence is the job.
“What we do is not a sprint, but it’s more like a marathon relay,” he said.
He ran through the list of mayors, governors, university leaders and county officials who each took a leg and noted that Rutgers President William Tate is now “catching us in stride.”
The pitch hasn’t changed, Paladino said.
New Jersey already has the universities, the health systems and “the greatest concentration of pharmaceutical and life science companies anywhere.”
“What we needed was a place to bring them together,” he said.
The key, Paladino said, is that HELIX partners “aren’t simply located near one another; they’re actually working with one another, and that’s the distinction that matters.”
“The ultimate measure of the HELIX will never be the amount of square feet we build. It will be the discoveries that we make.”
In a way, Paladino described the job of a club owner.
“Our responsibility was not to predict every innovation that would happen here,” he said. “Our responsibility was to create a place where innovation could happen.”
