The Taystee Lab Building in West Harlem has been selected as the new home of the City Innovations Collaborative (CInC), a new regional innovation engine created by the City College of New York and the Foundation for City College Inc. to seed, cultivate and sustain a thriving regional life science ecosystem in New York City, announced The Janus Property Company.
CInC will be an anchor tenant at the Taystee Building, which is located adjacent to the City College campus and within the innovation triangle shared with Columbia University and the New York Structural Biology Center and will support commercialization and translational efforts for several new ventures concurrently.
“CInC was created to expand the CCNY/CUNY innovation ecosystem and will be a collaborative model with resources provided by many diverse stakeholders including universities, government, industry, investors, foundations, entrepreneurs and patient advocacy groups,” said Senior Director of Innovation Management and Business Development Andrew Wooten, who is also president of CinC. “The resources required for innovation development are very specialized by stage of development and class of product and very significant. No single organization can do the work alone.”
CinC will provide entrepreneurs and CCNY students with access to advanced infrastructure, instrumentation and makerspaces, where they can test high-risk commercialization and translational ideas in a low-risk environment. It is the newest of the impactful life sciences initiatives to call the Manhattanville Factory District home and joins numerous research, academic, for-profit and not-for-profit ventures already located in this growing innovation triangle between the District, City College and Columbia University. Janus’s properties in the District total approximately 1.4 million rentable square feet of space developed and under development. Additionally, a new hotel and luxury rental units are currently being completed adjacent to the Taystee Building.
In addition to the funding that Janus is providing, CInC is the recipient of funding from both NYC Economic Development Corp., as well as a recently announced Empire State Development grant for $4.5 million. The grant, announced by Governor Kathy Hochul, is the final component needed to complete this complex innovation facility.
Previously, Governor Hochul cut the ribbon at the opening of the Factory District’s $700 million state-of-the-art Taystee Lab Building, an 11-story, 350,000-rentable-square-foot lab building that will be home to CinC in the innovation triangle of the 125th Street arts and innovation corridor.
