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Biotech sees successful formula. San Francisco group creates incubator for industry startups

IT MAY BE the most famous garage in the Bay Area.

In 1939 at the garage rented by David Packard and fellow Stanford University graduate William Hewlett, the duo launched a firm that manufactured test and measurement instruments on an initial investment of $538. Today, what started in the garage is Hewlett-Packard Co., which now has a market capitalization of more than $100 billion. The garage in Palo Alto is a state historic landmark.

On Friday, in San Francisco, the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) introduced its own space where it hopes biotech innovation will spring from what it informally calls the "QB3 Garage." A picture of the Hewlett-Packard garage was hung up at the space to illustrate the inspiration for the name.

"Like their garage, we hope the QB3 Garage will be the primordial soup that great companies will eventually emerge from," said Douglas Crawford, associate executive director of QB3 (www.qb3.org).

The QB3 Garage is located on the Mission Bay campus of the University of California, San Francisco.

In general terms, it is an incubator for small biotech companies that are in their initial stages of development.

However, it has two major differences from traditional incubators.First, the space isn’t controlled by venture capitalists who already have an invested interest in them.

And, second, the amount of space given to each tenant is very small. While other incubators might rent 2,500 square feet to a single tenant, this one splits that amount of space among six tenants.

By David Morrill, BUSINESS WRITER

Full Story: http://www.insidebayarea.com/business/ci_4349235

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