CIC St. Louis, which operates a campus in the Cortex Innovation District in the Central West End, said it plans a $2 million renovation of its laboratories there.
The project, in CIC's space at 20 S. Sarah St., is a joint investment with Cortex, CIC’s partner in St. Louis, according to a Monday news release. Work on the project kicked off in January with completion targeted for late spring, officials said.
CIC St. Louis is the local organization of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), which owns and operates about 1 million square feet of workspace and event space in the U.S. and globally,
In conjunction with the local upgrades, CIC said it has expanded its existing sponsorship agreement with Waltham, Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO), to bring equipment, training and services to CIC St. Louis' Innovation Campus. Thermo Fisher, a $43 billion provider of life sciences technologies and services, has operations in Berkeley in north St. Louis County.
As founding sponsor of CIC Philadelphia starting in 2022, Thermo Fisher's instruments, equipment, technology, and software were available across 450 benches on four floors of lab space at CIC's Philadelphia campus. Officials said the renovations at CIC's St. Louis campus are being driven by the success of CIC Labs in Philadelphia, which has worked with nearly 400 client organizations that have raised over $1.66 billion in venture capital.
The newly signed sponsorship in St. Louis, as in Philadelphia, will give CIC access to Thermo Fisher’s life sciences portfolio, as well as application support training, officials said.
CIC St. Louis' renovated labs will be "will be purpose-built to support scientists developing solutions to some of the greatest challenges in the health and life sciences fields," officials said.
The remodel in the South Sarah Street space will include six private labs to accommodate teams of one to 44 people, as well as shared lab space with six benches for individuals and small teams. Designed to be "move-in ready" the lab spaces will offer lab equipment and technology, eyewash stations, emergency showers, chemical fume hoods and biosafety cabinets, officials said.
Officials said the renovated space will strengthen the community in CIC’s St. Louis Innovation Campus, which serves over 200 clients with 160,000 square feet of workspace, labs and event space. In addition to its space at 20 S. Sarah, CIC has space in the 4220 Duncan Ave. and 4240 Duncan Ave. buildings.
“This renovation to reinvigorate our state-of-the-art shared and private labs space, with the support of Cortex and Thermo Fisher, will position CIC Labs as a best-in-class solution for young life science companies planning to scale in St. Louis,” CIC St. Louis General Manager John Land said in the release. “St. Louis is proving itself as a leader in the bioscience field and we are proud to support the community of entrepreneurs and startups working at this pace.”
“Cortex is proud to partner with CIC to enable these important lab renovations to facilitate high-level research among the continuum of discovery to commercialization,” said Sam Fiorello, Cortex president and CEO, said in a statement. “We are delighted by Thermo Fisher’s commitment to invest to provide Cortex and CIC members more complex research tools along with a new level of expertise to advance critical research.”
Cortex is a 200-acre innovation and entrepreneurship hub founded in 2002 through a collaboration by Washington University, BJC HealthCare, University of Missouri-St. Louis, Saint Louis University and the Missouri Botanical Garden.
