As the pharma industry evolves, the timelines for discovery and development projects are shortening dramatically. Research scientists involved with personal projects, as well as pharmaceutical and life science start ups are up against major hurdles involving necessary resources and costs to get projects off the gound.

Mass Innovation Labs is set on solving those issues. Mass Innovation Labs provides members with a turn-key laboratory environment, making milestone discoveries possible as soon as the day after moving in. By providing research scientists and innovators with a dynamic and on-demand lab as well as office space and other equipment, development to commercialization is expedited drastically.

Contract Pharma spoke with chief executive officer and founder Amrit Chaudhuri about the inspiration behind Mass Innovation labs, and how the resources and needs in lab spaces may change in the coming years.

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Contract Pharma: What issues inspired you to start Mass Innovation Labs in order to solve them?

Amrit Chaudhuri: Having been a muti-time entrepreneur in the life science industry, working on therapeutics to bioinformatics, I realized that most high potential companies shared similar hurdles in their growth. Upon further review, my co-founders and I did a deep dive into what made companies in early stages through the commercialization stage successful, and how that contrasted with big pharma companies. What we realized was the industry was in desperate need of a platform to execute cutting-edge research, not just come up with new ideas—a true commercialization platform that allowed for resource deployment, similar to big pharma, but accessible to any size or stage of company. That is what we are building at Mass Innovation Labs.
 
CP: What successful programs have come out of Mass Innovation Labs so far?

AC: Cue Biopharma, CRISPR Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, C4 Therapeutics, Gritstone Oncology, TCR2 Therapeutics, and many other notable industry leaders.
 
CP: Do you see R&D timelines decreasing in the future within the biotech industry?
 
AC: Yes. We believe the life cycle of experiments is getting shorter and more research is happening in parallel to push science forward. Mass Innovation Labs actively works on how to iteratively improve life cycle optimization of on-the-bench research.
 
CP: Equipment wise, how do you think future lab spaces will differ from current lab spaces? 

AC: Labs are becoming more modular; functionality is becoming more centralized; automated high-throughput is becoming the standard; the ability to cloud control experiments is moving toward reality.
 
CP: Can you detail the features of some of the lab spaces?

AC: We develop labs that are made to be next-generation modifiable and modular. We design labs using new technology, build them using new materials, and monitor them using cloud processes. We can take a biology lab, turn it into a chemistry lab, and redevelop it back to a tissue culture lab on the fly. All done with permitting, safety, compliance, and the ability to run BSL2+ research.
 
CP: Is there anything else about Mass Innovation Labs that you’d like to share?

AC: We believe that our new offering of modular infrastructure and resources will cause a shift in how global research is executed, bringing about an industry-wide change, similar to how AWS changed how tech companies addressed and built data centers. We believe this change will be transformative and ubiquitous within five to ten years.

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Amrit Chaudhuri is the CEO and co-founder of Mass Innovation Labs. Amrit is a recognized leader and ardent entrepreneur in the area of drug development. He is the founder of Advanced Peptides, a specialty contract research organization focused on peptide chemistry. Amrit holds numerous patents, has created five successful companies, and has been involved in many FDA clinical trials. In 2017, Amrit was named one of INC Magazine’s Top 20 Healthcare Innovators and Entrepreneurs.