Last month, leaders of the University of Vermont ventured two miles north of the stately central campus in Burlington to a nondescript building in a Colchester business park. There, with lofty speeches and a celebratory ribbon-cutting, they opened what amounts to a modest coworking space for budding biotech companies.
Modest, yes — but university officials have high hopes that their new BioLabs Innovation Center will help bolster the school’s reputation as a top-tier research hub.
New UVM president Marlene Tromp told the small crowd that the center was part of the goal “to bring this rural university onto the national and global stage.” Richard Page, dean of the Larner College of Medicine, added, “I see this biological innovation center as a magnet to attract innovators from throughout the country.”
UVM partnered with BioLabs, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company, on the $2.2 million conversion of 7,000 square feet of underused space in the university’s Colchester research building. The center offers offices and a modern laboratory outfitted with the cutting-edge equipment needed for a biotech incubator. BioLabs operates an international network of 15 shared lab and office facilities for life science startups in the U.S. and Europe. It will manage the center for UVM.
“I see this biological innovation center as a magnet to attract innovators from throughout the country.”
Richard Page
The project is the university’s latest initiative as it seeks to strengthen its reputation as a research institution, something championed by former president Suresh Garimella. In February, UVM was named an R1 university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, a designation given to schools that spend at least $50 million annually on research and award 70 or more research doctorates. Universities view R1 status as vital to attracting top research talent and investment.
Kirk Dombrowski, UVM’s vice president of research, stressed that the school needs to stand out in the increasingly competitive world of higher education. For a prospective faculty member to even consider coming to Vermont, “We have to be able to say … that we stand with Tufts and Yale and the other BioLabs and that they can have the same ecosystem here that they have there,” Dombrowski said.
Many researchers are daunted by the operational, administrative and financial challenges of turning their innovations into marketable products or therapies, Page said. One of the biggest burdens is finding affordable, flexible labs and offices.
The UVM BioLabs is a combination coworking space and incubator to help young companies grow, according to James Stafford, the center’s director.
Stafford, a neuroscience researcher and assistant professor at the UVM med school, is a Vermont native who founded a biotech startup in Oregon before moving back home. As the center’s director, his job is to lease the new space to researchers and young companies. Three organizations have signed on so far. Over the next two years, he hopes to add 10 to 20 more.
One of the attractions of the Colchester BioLabs is the competitive price it offers — half to a third the cost of renting similar facilities in places such as Boston or San Diego, he said. Another selling point is flexibility: Memberships and leases are offered on a month-to-month basis.
The center charges a $200 membership fee, plus fees for using specific spaces. A desk in the shared office area runs $300 a month, while a lab bench costs $1,800 a month.
In addition, Stafford and his operations manager are on hand to help, from delivering packages to offering advice about regulatory filings, working with suppliers and making connections with others in the industry, he said.
“It’s really sort of a white-glove service for companies so they can stay focused on their innovation,” Stafford said.
John Milligan knows how pricey lab space can be. He’s vice president of research and development for Honey Pot, an Atlanta-based firm that makes plant-based women’s health and menstrual products. The company is among the first to rent a lab bench at the new center.
“Building our own lab from the ground up would have been prohibitively expensive,” said Milligan, who has worked at other consumer products companies in Vermont, including Twincraft Skincare.
Mixing essential oils and testing plant-based materials for use in menstrual products may not be what most people think of as “biotech,” he acknowledged, but Honey Pot’s testing and product development work needs a fully outfitted commercial lab. BioLabs fit the bill perfectly.
Not far from Milligan is a lab bench rented by Brad Palmer, a UVM assistant professor who specializes in heart tissue research. He uses the lab for his drug-testing company, Sarcometrics.
On a recent tour, Palmer, wearing a white lab coat, pointed to a workbench laden with beakers, pipettes, a computer and a powerful microscope. A glass Pyrex container on a bed of crushed ice contained several thin slices of rat heart tissue. Palmer and his research assistants, both UVM grads, test various drugs in development to see how they affect the live cells, he explained. The testing helps drug companies assess the effectiveness of potential new heart medications.
Palmer described a kind of feedback loop the new center can spark: BioLabs’ connection to UVM will make the university more attractive to professors and students, which will help grow the talent pool of researchers, who in turn will make the Burlington area more attractive to biotech entrepreneurs.
Boston is a vital place for this research in part because of the high concentration of biotech firms and researchers connected to elite universities. But when Palmer starts a new drug development firm next year, he’s planning to grow it right here, he said.
“It’ll be cheaper, and yet I’ll have all the facilities that I would otherwise have gotten in Boston,” Palmer said.
BioLabs is able to keep costs down, in part by partnering with instrumentation firms that provide testing and laboratory equipment. Officials did not provide financial details about the partnership but said it creates a symbiotic relationship: Researchers get access to and experience using cutting-edge scientific instruments, which they might be more inclined to use if their startup becomes successful.
Other biotech firms are sponsoring BioLabs as a way to keep tabs on the research under way at startups, with an eye to possible partnerships in the future.
“Some companies just have a real interest in supporting people who do cool stuff,” Stafford said.
While the lab’s main purpose is to help local researchers and entrepreneurs turn research into commercial products, UVM is also trying to send a message about what it can offer.
“Part of our goal is to get people to think about Vermont as a place for biotech and bio-economy innovation,” Stafford said.
Visit the Office of the Vice President for Research booth at the Vermont Tech Jam on Saturday, October 25, at Hula. Find more information and preregister at techjamvt.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “UVM’s Big Biotech Bet | The school hopes its $2.2 million investment in a lab and coworking space will attract cutting-edge researchers”
This article appears in The Tech Issue 2025.
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