CHAMPAIGN — Leaders from the University of Illinois, city and state gathered together Tuesday morning to celebrate the culmination of a $1.3 million project a couple of years in the making.
The University of Illinois Research Park held a grand opening for LabWorks, which officials described as a new facility for “growth-stage life sciences startups.”
LabWorks is located at 2109 S. Oak St., in a building that was previously home to Starfire Industries.
According to Laura Bleill, director of external engagement for the research park, the facility includes three distinct suites that each have a lab connected to office space. There are also some facilities that all tenants have access to, including a shared lab.
“About $1.3 million was invested in about 5,000 square feet that you’re going to see today,” said Laura Appenzeller, executive director of the research park. “... It was unattainable, in many cases, for small businesses to achieve that type of investment. And so we came together with many partners to deliver a space that we hope has high-growth potential.”
Research park officials said that Labworks was funded by both public and private partners, including the Rebuild Illinois Wet Lab Capital Program, the city of Champaign, the research park and GEM Realty Capital, which is the landlord for the building.
In discussing the idea behind the project, Bleill said that it can be hard for life-sciences startups to grow because lab facilities are “in short supply and expensive to build.”
“If you’re a software company, you just kind of need an office and a bunch of computers and desktops, and that overhead is not nearly as significant as what it takes to commercialize life science technologies,” she said.
In order to help bridge this gap, the state’s Rebuild Illinois Wet Lab Capital Program provided matching grants that funded the creation of new life-sciences labs across the state, she said. LabWorks was awarded a $550,000 grant from the program in 2021.
When the cost of the project grew, the city of Champaign allocated $100,000 to help bring LabWorks to completion, research park officials said.
Tuesday’s ribbon cutting also served to welcome the facility’s first tenant, Epivara. The Champaign-based company has developed a way to spay and neuter animals via injection rather than surgery, said founder and CEO Jay Ko, who is also a professor with the university’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
Ko said that Epivara’s new home at LabWorks is larger, which allows the company to bring in more research equipment. It also provides a location where their offices and labs are together instead of being separate.
“So we have a lot more interaction,” he said. “And this new facility is better for our biological research than the previous place. It was a chemical lab, so we had some limitations.”
In addition to Epivara, another company has signed a letter of intent for one of the other lab suites, Bleill said.
According to Appenzeller, this second tenant works in the field of plant genetics.
