Pasadena Bioscience Collaborative blooms

A new facility dedicated to fostering the biotechnology industry is already half full in Pasadena, signaling continued expansion in local biological and chemical research.

The Pasadena Bioscience Collaborative, a nonprofit biotechnology incubator, launched in 2004 with one tenant. Now, it’s home to 17 companies, with other potential tenants waiting for grants to open their doors.

The rapid growth led the incubator to open a third facility capable of hosting eight companies at the end of last year, and it now has only four open slots remaining.

Bruce Blomstorm, the incubator’s president, said the facility stands out from other start-up collaboratives because of its focus on so-called “wet-lab” capabilities — essential for doing work in biology and chemistry.

“We are now able to say we’re fully operational, and able to take on some more tenants,” he said.

The third facility is located near the two existing facilities close to the intersection of Altadena Drive and Foothill. Each tenant uses about one-eighth of the 3,500 square feet available space because of a shared-use model, Blomstorm said..

Each company is provided a work bench, a desk and access to all of the incubator’s equipment in all three locations.

One of the tenants, Yong Song, said when he launched his biotech business last July, he looked at spaces in Pomona and Orange County before deciding to come to the facility in Pasadena because of its infrastructure.

Song’s company, YSL Bioprocess Development Co., creates biomedical testing applications and testing reagents for immunology, oncology and stem-cell research.

The cell-testing processes his company creates requires the use of expensive refrigeration equipment, which the local incubator could provide because, as a nonprofit, it can accept donated items, such as refrigerators, Song said.

“For me, the most important thing is the support of the staff, the equipment we can use and also the collaboration we can have with other companies,” he said.

In addition, because rent for his company is $1,200 a month, it is able to keep its overhead low at a time when preserving funding is crucial, Song said.

Pasadena Economic Development Manager Eric Duyshart said the incubator had been running in the black for several years, so the city’s initial seed money to help with its launch has proven to be a positive investment.

“We do have the intellectual capital [in Pasadena] to start these companies,” he said. “The whole premise of the city and other institutions getting behind the Bioscience Collaborative is we make it easier for these local ideas to germinate and grow.”

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