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Biotech and pharma at PARK INNOVAARE

4.8.17
PARK INNOVAARE is responding to the increasing demand for highly flexible, easy-to-access laboratories.
PARK INNOVAARE is responding to the increasing demand for highly flexible, easy-to-access laboratories.

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PARK INNOVAARE provides the best possible operating conditions for biotech and pharmaceutical companies. This includes the availability of modern laboratories and office space.


Already eight high-tech companies have joined the site, located just a stone’s throw away from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). Four of these companies are active in the pharmaceutical, chemical and biotech industries and benefit from PARK INNOVAARE’s perfect environment.

One of the most crucial factors for these young companies – as well as for the R&D units of large enterprises – is accessible, state-of-the-art lab and office space. Although the market offers a lot of opportunities, the possibility to work directly on the campus of a university or research institute, such as the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), is rare.

Functional but also appealing lab and office space on a vibrant campus

With its brand-new, highly modern “deliveryLAB” (400 sqm of office and communication space), PARK INNOVAARE offers companies a chance to relocate and work more closely together with the PSI, Switzerland’s biggest research center for the natural and engineering sciences. Responding to the current needs of its resident companies, PARK INNOVAARE’s space and service offering comprises:

  • 3 x 38 sqm offices in the deliveryLAB (fully equipped and serviced),
  • 200 sqm of laboratories (of which one separate unit of 50 sqm is currently available for rent),
  • 6 co-working desks in the deliveryLAB, for temporary or short-term use,
  • New co-working area that will soon be expanded to 100 sqm,
  • Conference rooms with state-of-the-art presentation technology,
  • Available on request (short term): 80 sqm office, fully equipped and serviced.

deliveryLAB

The labs are located at the PSI lab facilities, right next door to the Institute’s biochemical laboratories, and as such are embedded in an environment with cutting-edge hardware, including microscopes, centrifuges and cooling hardware, among other things.

New campus in the making, offering a huge translational potential for industries

PARK INNOVAARE’s new campus is being planned right now and will be built by 2020 (the building application has already been filed). By then, 35,000 sqm of total story area will be realized in the first construction phase. Of that, about 7,000 sqm are reserved for workshops and special laboratories (physics, wet chemistry and biology labs), and 1,300 sqm for clean rooms (ISO5 and ISO6). Of the space available for rent, 70% has already been appropriated.

New Campus

Thus, PARK INNOVAARE is responding to the increasing demand for highly flexible, easy-to-access laboratories. This includes a combination of shared and private lab space and office space and features value-added solutions including operational support, education programs and business services available at competitive prices. As such, PARK INNOVAARE supports an open-innovation, no-strings-attached approach.

Shared laboratory equipment includes / will include:

  • Vacuum and air at benches
  • Fume hoods
  • Tissue culture facilities with biosafety hoods
  • CO2 incubators
  • Centrifuges
  • Inverted microscopes, phase-contrast microscope, dissecting microscope
  • Microcentrifuges
  • Refrigerators and freezers (-20° and -80°C)
  • Etc.

Longstanding tradition, unparalleled infrastructure and worldwide reputation

The roots of PARK INNOVAARE as an innovation site go back to the 1960s. The decision for the settlements of the Swiss Federal Institute for Reactor Research, founded in 1960, and the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Physics, founded eight years later, was the starting point of a long-term development that has continued up to now. The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), founded in 1988 by a merger of the two federal institutions, has rapidly transformed into a globally recognized and scientifically leading multidisciplinary research institute for natural and engineering sciences. In 1989 construction began on the spallation neutron source SINQ, which went into operation in 1996. In 2001 the Swiss Light Source (SLS) was launched into operation. In 2003, only two years later, preparations for the new X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL began. The X-ray laser with extremely short light pulses was opened in December 2016.

The PSI is currently the only institute worldwide to offer the three most important sources for the study of the structure and dynamics of condensed matter (neutrons, muons and synchrotron radiation) at one location accessible to the international user community.