John Flavin, a local entrepreneur that’s been heavily invested in the local medtech industry, launched a new seed fund and accelerator program for life sciences, medtech and bioinformatics startups.
Called Portal Innovations, the venture aims to build and scale early-stage companies coming out of academic laboratories, corporations and innovation hubs, while connecting them to investors.
Flavin, the co-founder and chairman of Boston-based startup Pyxis Oncology and most recently the chief financial officer at Endotronix, said Portal will fill a gap in the market for local medtech startups.
“There’s a lot more activity and faculty who are inventing products that have market application in the life sciences arena, but there really is no market-based seed fund or accelerator that can put together the teams and the assets to help those companies get to Series A rounds,” Flavin said.
Portal has partnered with Trammel Crow Company, a Dallas-based real estate developer, to design and develop wet and dry lab space for early-stage startups in the program to work out of. The 36,000-square-foot lab space, which is slated to open within the next two years, will be housed inside the new Fulton Labs complex in Fulton Market.
Inside, startups will have access to industry-grade scientific equipment that allows companies to run experiments as they develop medical devices, medications and other medical therapies.
Companies to be incubated in Portal have yet to be chosen, but Flavin said he will be working with venture capitalists, pharmaceutical companies and medtech firms to hand-pick four to five startups.
“Having been focused on the ecosystem for so long, I have special insight into where the next ideas are coming from,” Flavin said.
Flavin’s startup Pyxis, which he co-founded with Univeristy of Chicago researcher Tom Gajewski in 2018, specializes in developing therapies to help patients defeat difficult to treat cancers. Before leaving day-to-day operations at the startup, Flavin helped the company raise a $22 million Series A round led by German pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer.
Pyxis was originally launched out of UChicago but moved to Boston because there was no lab in Chicago to develop it in, Flavin said. Part of the team is still in Hyde Park, but most of the operations are now in Boston.
“We didn’t have lab space here to incubate Pyxis, so the idea behind Portal is to [create] more Pyxises because there are more opportunities like that around here,” said Flavin, who also previously led UChicago's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. “By offering that special infrastructure that’s needed, it will allow companies to grow and scale here in the city.”
