BioEnterprise Inc. will turn over its assets and operations to three of its founding organizations — Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic Foundation and University Hospitals — as the bioscience company incubator winds down, the university said on Monday.
Case Western Reserve will purchase real estate owned by BioEnterprise — a condominium of two floors at 11000 Cedar Ave. in Cleveland, the university said.
All three founding organizations will use the assets "to further the BioEnterprise mission," the university said.
The university intends to continue to run the incubator, which hosts 13 bioscience companies, "and honor its current tenants' leases."
"When launched in 2002, BioEnterprise represented a new and invaluable addition to Northeast Ohio — both in terms of offering knowledge and expertise to emerging startups, but also in helping establish Northeast Ohio as a nationally known innovation hub," the founders said in a joint statement.
"Over the ensuing years, our region has benefited enormously from those efforts, and today our region has such a thriving and integrated ecosystem that much of what BioEnterprise did now takes place organically across the community," they said.
BioEnterprise was launched to grow the bioscience industry in Northeast Ohio at a time when Cleveland's major hospital systems were more competitors than collaborators.
Along with its partners, BioEnterprise is credited with creating, recruiting and accelerating more than 350 health IT, medical device and biopharmaceutical companies in Northeast Ohio, for which they helped to raise more than $3 billion in funding.
BioEnterprise significantly scaled back its operations in late amid the economic uncertainty caused by losing a majority of its state funding and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The organization lost its Ohio Third Frontier funding because it was included in a corruption probe of Cuyahoga County finances.
For a time, BioEnterprise executives led the marketing, programming and tenant engagement activities of the county-owned Global Center for Health Innovation in downtown Cleveland.
