Mayor Thomas M. Menino today announced that two new biotech companies – Ginkgo BioWorks and Eutropics Pharmaceuticals – have moved to Boston with the assistance of the City’s LifeTech initiative. This news follows the recent report by the Milken Institute which ranked Boston as the #1 life sciences cluster in the country. Speaking at a press conference at Ginkgo’s new home in the Marine Industrial Park, Mayor Menino praised the two companies for working with the City’s LifeTech initiative, which aims to attract and retain life sciences companies by providing financing, site location and permitting assistance.

“The City of Boston continues to be an attractive place for biotechnology and life sciences companies to locate,” Mayor Menino said. “I am proud to welcome Ginkgo and Eutropics to Boston. These are forward-looking businesses on the cutting edge of technology. They can find no better place to commercialize their ideas than Boston – a city known for its drive to discover and incredible innovation.”

“I’m proud that our LifeTech program has once again been able to attract new companies to Boston and our LifeTech Innovation Fund is providing biotech startups with the resources that they need to grow and thrive,” said John Palmieri, Director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Ginkgo BioWorks, a new synthetic biology startup founded by a team of five PhDs from MIT, worked with the LifeTech team to help them find their new location at 7 Tide Street in the Marine Industrial Park on the South Boston Waterfront. Ginkgo is also the recipient of a $150,000 LifeTech Innovation Fund loan through the Boston Local Development Corporation.

“Ginkgo BioWorks is very excited to join the Boston biotech community with our new, 3,400 square foot laboratory space in the Marine Industrial Park, said Jason Kelly, founder of Ginkgo. “LifeTech Boston was a tremendous help in securing our space and the LifeTech loan program certainly influenced our decision to locate our company in Boston.”

Ginkgo’s goal is to make biology easier to engineer. For industrial applications, this means making it easier to re-program production organisms, such as bacteria and yeast, to produce products including biopharmaceuticals, specialty chemicals, biofuels, and biomaterials. Ginkgo plans to offer both products and services targeted at the synthetic biology research market. Ginkgo products will include life science kits and reagents that enable researchers to construct multi-gene pathways for engineering organisms manually.

Eutropics, a biotech company that develops small molecule therapeutics for treatment of blood cancers, was originally created out of Harvard Medical School, Dana Farber Cancer Institute and MIT. Previously located in Woburn, the five-person company sought new lab space in Boston and worked with the LifeTech team to find their new home at 609 Albany Street on the BU Medical Campus at BioSquare. Now that Eutropics is home in their new 1,500 square foot space in Boston, they hope to add more employees in the near future.

“As an early stage company, we thought it would be advantageous to be proximal to our advisory scientific and clinical team members at HMS and DFCI. For this reason, and the excellent infrastructure and central location Boston provides, we decided to locate in Boston proper,” said Michael Cardone of Eutropics. “Mayor Menino’s office was proactive in encouraging our company to establish our lab within the city and LifeTech Boston was instrumental in providing support for us to do this. We have been operating at BUMC for three months and feel that we have indeed landed in the right place.”

Eutropics' mission is to address the need for effective drugs for treating aggressive forms of lymphoma, leukemia and other cancers. The company's objective is to discover and develop new cancer drugs that are targeted to non-responsive tumor types in cancer patients. Their solution relies on proprietary compounds that are highly selective for specific proteins that, when targeted, cause cancer cells to die combined with novel, proprietary diagnostic assays that enable them to determine which patients will be susceptible to therapeutic agents.

About LifeTech Boston:

LifeTech Boston, launched by Mayor Menino in 2004 and managed by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, offers assistance and business tools to attract, maintain, support, and enhance companies involved in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and other related industries. LifeTech Boston includes a finance program that supports these companies with low-interest loans.

Press Contact: Jessica Shumaker, 617.918.4446.

Release Date: September 28, 2009