Americans willing to take risks and responsibility, German immigrant and Biolabs founder says

By Guy Page

Biotech start-ups, buckle up and start your engines – the BioLabs Innovation Center at the University of Vermont (UVM) is officially open for business today, Tuesday Sept. 23 at 11:30 AM in Colchester.  

BioLabs is a for-profit incubator space for life science startups. As entrepreneurs and investors, BioLabs has first-hand experience with the pain-points biotech startups face.

CEO/founder Johannes Fruehauf helped develop the first RNAi drug to be used in a clinic. An immigrant from Germany, he traces America’s entrepreneurial spirit to the risk-taking and work ethic of its original immigrants.

“America, if you look at it, who went to America? It’s not the people who were allset in the country. It’s not the aristocrats, right, it’s the people who had a hard time, who had their back to the wall, but reacted by doing something,” he said in a 2017 interview with the Immigrant Learning Center. 

“They took the journey over the sea or through the desert to come here, right? And so America was built by sort of positively selecting from these strong people who are willing to take a hardship to go to this other place and then built it here. And you can see that, coming over from Germany, I clearly see that difference right. There’s a much larger population willing to take risks here and to take responsibility and that is what differentiates America from any other country in the world.’ 

Founded in 2006 as Vithera, the privately-held Cambridge, MA-based company has 144 employees, according to Pitchbook. Rebranded, BioLabs offers a membership-based network of shared lab and office facilities equipped with fully supported lab equipment, such as PCR machines, plate readers, centrifuges, flow cytometry, and sequencing. 

PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, is a laboratory technique used to rapidly make millions of copies of a specific segment of DNA, allowing for detailed study and analysis. It involves repeated cycles of heating and cooling to separate DNA strands and synthesize new ones using a special enzyme called DNA polymerase.

As the nation’s first BioLabs facility in a rural state, the new UVM center marks a significant milestone for the university and region, offering early-stage life science startups and companies’ critical infrastructure, equipment, and resources designed to foster innovation and entrepreneurship.  

This state-of-the-art biotechnology incubator features shared wet labs, private labs, flexible office spaces, and community areas, equipped with more than $1 million in cutting-edge technology. The BioLabs Innovation Center at UVM will support a community of startup companies to catalyze innovation, entrepreneurship and serve as a powerful economic engine for a rural region’s continued development. 

Being a member at BioLabs enables access to the UVM research enterprise for collaboration as well as access to core facilities like the Vermont Advanced Computing Center and the Center for Biomedical Shared Resources.

According to online sources, Fruehauf received his medical degree and practiced internal medicine and OB/GYN in Germany, came to the U.S. to accompany his wife on her academic studies. He studied as a post-doc in Boston, and then became a biotech entrepreneur and investor with a track record of building and growing successful companies and research ecosystems. He’s also a physician-scientist experienced in the development of complex biologics programs from bench into the clinic, including the first ever oral RNAi drug to enter the clinic. And he is co-founder and General Partner at MissionBioCapital. 

BioLabs has locations in Cambridge, Boston, Durham, Philadelphia, San Diego, New York, Princeton, Los Angeles, Dallas, New Haven, Tokyo, Paris and Heidelberg. 

According to his Linked In page, Fruehauf’s specialties include “Company building, Structure of Innovation, Venture Capital, Biologics development, translational science, clinical trials, drug delivery, oligonucleotide therapeutics, startup financing, preclinical and clinical development, technology licensing and development, entrepreneurship, international relations.”

In a recent interview, Fruehauf was asked for one piece of advice to individuals looking to launch a biotech startup. He answered:

“Know your science inside-out. Hire good people. Buckle up and be ready for a hell of a ride.”