The University of Chicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation announced a new partnership with a Cincinnati-based biotech company to help build out the university startup pipeline and support early company formation.
The strategic agreement with Orange Grove Bio will see the company license new life-sciences technologies out of the university and help develop them into products for commercialization. Orange Grove Bio will have a team member local to Chicago to see this through.
"Having an Orange Grove Bio location on the South Side would enable us to closely interact with the academic teams at the University. When we build a startup, we do it at the researcher's house," Rich Ganz, senior venture partner at Orange Grove Bio, said in a statement.
As part of the partnership, Orange Grove Bio will lead efforts to offer new educational opportunities to researchers, including a mix of workshops, seminars and networking events, along with a Ph.D. internship program. The drug investment and development firm hopes to offer new opportunities to make launching a company a little easier for faculty who are interested in becoming entrepreneurs themselves.
Samir Mayekar, managing director of Polsky Center, said the partnership will provide UChicago researchers with new opportunities to gain "industry-informed perspective" to their innovation.
Orange Grove Bio moved its corporate headquarters from New York to Cincinnati in 2021. The move was spurred in part by a desire to reach millions of people in one day, Ryan Fox, Orange Grove Bio's chief business operations officer at the time told the Cincinnati Business Journal when the move was first announced.
"If you take Cincinnati as a hub from a biotech standpoint, you’re one tank of gas away from Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Lexington, Ohio State, Cleveland Clinic — places that collectively represent billions of dollars in federal funding," said Fox, who has since become CEO.
Orange Grove Bio has similar partnerships with universities across the U.S., including the University of Pittsburgh.
Sign up for the Business Journal’s free daily newsletter to receive the latest business news impacting Chicago.
