Three Biopharma Companies to Settle into New Breakthrough Properties Home

Three companies in the Biotech Beach hub have found a new home in San Diego. On Wednesday, Breakthrough Properties announced the launch of StudioLabs, a turnkey, flexible lab and office solution that has been developed for hyper-growth life sciences companies. 

Breakthrough said all 28,000 square feet of space in its inaugural StudioLabs site has already been leased by three companies: Protego Biopharma, Velia, Inc. and Actio Biosciences.  

Protego hit the streets last year with $51 million in a Series A financing round. The company said proceeds from the financial raises will be used to support the development of new classes of drugs for the treatment of protein misfolding diseases. This includes diseases that are associated with misfolded or mistrafficked proteins, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, cystic fibrosis, emphysema and more. 

Harnessing its Pharmacological Chaperone and Unfolded Protein Response (UPR) modulators platform, which was based on groundbreaking research from company founder and Scripps Research Institute professor Jeffery W. Kelly, Protego is discovering small molecule drug candidates that enable protein folding and trafficking in order to address the root cause of the disease.  

Actio is developing a portfolio of drugs designed to modulate the activity of proteins responsible for rare diseases. The company, which was founded by David B. Goldstein, founding director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, and John G. McHutchison, CEO of Assembly Bio, also hopes to translate these findings into common diseases. But how the company intends to do that is so far being played close to the chest. The company’s website is currently under construction. 

The third company, Velia, Inc. remains a mystery, as it does not currently have a web presence.  

In its announcement this morning, Breakthrough said all three companies have collectively raised more than $120 million in financing.  

The San Diego site will open this summer as part of a larger office-to-lab redevelopment at Breakthrough Properties’ recently acquired Torrey Plaza campus. The life science real estate development company said the lab and office suites range in size from 4,000 to 15,000 square feet. Each suite includes dedicated office space, huddle rooms, wet lab spaces, as well as lab utilities and support rooms. 

Susie Harborth, executive vice president of business operations at Breakthrough Properties, said StudioLabs has been designed as a best-in-class life sciences environment that allows young companies to hit the ground running with the fully furnished and operational space.  

"More than providing the highest quality labs and infrastructure, we provide companies with a dedicated on-site team with decades of experience creating and operating labs. Our mission is to handle the most operationally intensive aspects of the lab environment so that companies in our StudioLabs ecosystem have the freedom to focus solely on growth and discovery,” Harborth said in a statement.  

Based on the success of its San Diego location, Breakthrough said it intends to carry the StudioLabs concept beyond San Diego to other locations under its management. The company’s operations stretch from California to Europe. Breakthrough Properties said the StudioLabs concept is designed to provide companies the types of services that fit their evolving needs in order to allow them to quickly grow.