The latest tenant of Mount Ida Campus of UMass Amherst is a Cambridge-based biotechnology company that also plans to take up space at a nearly completed life sciences building in Boston’s South End.
PepGen Inc., a company developing therapies for severe neuromuscular and neurological diseases, has joined the Innovation and Collaboration Space at Mount Ida, which was purchased by UMass Amherst in 2018 after the college that had been at the site for more than a century announced it would abruptly close.
The company will have 12 of its employees based out of the space and will occupy 20 lab benches as well as office and meeting space, per an announcement from Mount Ida.
UMass Amherst's aim in buying the campus was to connect the campus’ students with Boston-area employers. In 2021, UMass announced it was opening co-working space for startups or small companies interested in co-locating with the state’s public research university.
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PepGen joins about nine other organizations co-located at the Innovation and Collaboration Space, including the sports tech company CoachUp, nanotechnology startup Xheme and the Massachusetts Export Center.
“Mount Ida is kind of a shopfront where we can encourage companies to come nine miles outside of Cambridge. It’s a lot tougher to convince them to come out 100 miles to Western Mass,” Kathryn Ellis, director of the UMass Innovation Institute, said in an interview with BostInno last month.
The Mount Ida Campus has become a place where UMass Amherst students can live while completing internships in Greater Boston, Ellis said. It's also become networking space for organizations, students and faculty.
The campus features a workspace where companies can access 22 offices, 15 conference rooms and 30 shared co-working spaces. There is also a 300,000-square-foot life science lab with lab benches that can be rented out, Ellis said.
As a part of the agreement to co-locate at Mount Ida, companies provide internships and networking opportunities for UMass Amherst students.
“Co-locating with UMass provides quality facilities and unique infrastructure support while allowing us to connect with students who will be future scientists and life sciences leaders,” Niels Svenstrup, senior vice president of discovery chemistry and manufacturing at PepGen, said in a statement.
In addition to its publicly listed office space at CIC Cambridge, PepGen has also leased space in BioMed Realty’s eight-story life sciences building in Boston’s South End neighborhood, the Boston Business Journal reported earlier this month. The company revealed in a security filing that it would be taking more than 31,600 square feet of space.
PepGen did not respond to an interview request before publication.
Ellis said in a statement that PepGen’s presence at the Innovation and Collaboration Space will be mutually beneficial for UMass Amherst students to gain experience in biotech, for faculty researchers in the life sciences and for the “fast-growing company,” which she said is interested in recruiting graduates.
“I think a lot of universities stick a title on their name and say, ‘Oh, we’re innovative.’ But if you’re not going to walk the walk… We’re trying to get to that concept of, we have an affordable education and it’s a really good education,” Ellis said. “We want to make sure when our students come out of UMass that they go into the workforce well prepared for industry challenges.”
