Manne Children's Research Institute, a life sciences incubator based in a Lincoln Park medical building that Sterling Bay bought last year from Anne & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago.
The goal is to address what Sterling Bay CEO Andy Gloor said is a shortage of high-quality life sciences research lab space in Chicago, which leads companies to move out of the area to research hotbeds such as Cambridge, Mass.
Other developers are eyeing properties elsewhere in Chicago, including in the Illinois Medical District and near McCormick Place, for research space.
Through Prysm, Sterling Bay and other investors will provide funding to early stage companies with the goal of creating new, high-paying jobs in the city. Companies that outgrow the incubator could move to space at Lincoln Yards, which Gloor said is expected to have a large portion of life sciences research space. Expanding companies that move to Lincoln Yards would further boost the value of Sterling Bay's investments in the startups.
"We want to provide a network to keep those companies in Chicago, similar to what 1871 has done for the tech sector," Gloor said of the incubator based in the Merchandise Mart. "This is an industry that is growing exponentially, and Chicago needs to get its fair share of these businesses."
Sterling Bay's initiative should complement the work already being done by Matter, a health care technology incubator that opened in 2015, said Matter CEO Steven Collens.
"There's a huge shortage of lab space in Chicago," Collens said. "It hurts life science entrepreneurs as they're looking to build their businesses."
Lab spaces can be significantly more expensive to build than other types of spaces, he noted. Matter thought about building lab spaces when it was opening but anticipated other non-Matter projects, then in the works, would fill the need. Those projects, however, he said, ended up falling through.
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