Dallas BioLabs incubator success: Biotech tenant relocates to permanent Texas headquarters

In March 2022, BioLabs cut the ribbon on its 37,000-square-foot facility at Pegasus Park. Its goal was to provide biotech and life sciences companies with the tools they need to relocate to the Dallas-Fort Worth area — and stay here.

That goal appears to be coming to fruition for one of its first tenants.

Just two months ago, drug discovery company Aakha Biologics relocated out of temporary incubator space at BioLabs Pegasus Park into permanent headquarters in Frisco.

Originally based in Boston, Aakha relocated to Dallas in May 2021 to take advantage of the lab space and equipment BioLabs provides. Aakha is the first company to successfully outgrow the BioLabs incubator, indicating that the facility’s mission of seeding Dallas’ life sciences ecosystem may yield promising results.

“It’s retaining and attracting talent to the region and … growing jobs in the region,” said Gabby Everett, site director for BioLabs at Pegasus Park. “And then also, it’s a success story as far as building biotech.”

CBRE identified the Dallas-Fort Worth area as an “emerging cluster of research talent” in the life sciences with “unusually rapid growth” between 2015 and 2020, as stated in CBRE’s 2022 Life Sciences Research Talent Report.

Chelsea Story, a CBRE senior associate, said the D-FW area has been able to attract biotech research talent but has struggled to find space to house growing companies.

“BioLabs has served a need that Dallas has always had in terms of life sciences, which is: Our market doesn’t have readily available lab space,” Story said.

Pegasus Park, a 25-acre, 750,000-square-foot lab and office campus, was developed by J. Small Investments and Montgomery Street Partners in partnership with Lyda Hill Philanthropies. BioLabs’ facility at Pegasus Park is the first BioLabs location in the central U.S.

BioLabs provides co-working spaces for biotech companies across the U.S. and at three international locations. There are currently 14 tenants at BioLabs Pegasus Park. Half hail from North Texas, and the other half relocated from across the U.S.

Using BioLabs’ business model, companies relocate to temporary incubating space where they have access to lab space, equipment and networking opportunities to grow their companies. Once companies are able to stand on their own, they relocate to their own permanent headquarters. The average incubation time for a company at BioLabs ranges from 12 to 18 months.

Since the price of doing biotech research is high, BioLabs provides incubating companies with a procurement system that offers them discounts on life science consumable products like tubes and antibodies. The facility also offers programming that allows companies to network with and learn from one another.

“It’s definitely been a case of ‘the rising tide floats all the ships,’” said Everett.

Hemanta Baruah developed the idea for Aakha Biologics while he was an entrepreneur in residence at Alloy Therapeutics in Boston.

After relocating to Dallas in May 2021, he worked in temporary BioLabs space at UT Southwestern Medical Center for nine months before moving into BioLabs’ permanent space at Pegasus Park once it opened in March of this year.

“I had this idea, my family was here, and I love Dallas,” Baruah said. “It was a coincidence that at that time, BioLabs was starting here, and so I decided that’s the right moment to join.”

During Aakha’s time with BioLabs, the company progressed from discovering antibodies to target cancer cells to identifying promising candidates for further study.

Now in a permanent space, the company seeks to create bispecific antibodies that can bind to two different cancer targets at the same time, explore the antibodies’ usefulness in animal studies and ideally move forward with human testing by the end of 2025.

Baruah said his time at Pegasus Park provided him with the biotech equipment he needed to develop drug candidates and helped him connect with the scientific community in North Texas. Aakha Biologics, which has four employees including Baruah, hopes to expand further in the coming months.

Story said she thinks BioLabs’ success with providing lab space in Dallas may lead to a push for similar spaces in the D-FW area.

“In my opinion, they’ve spurred attention to the need for that type of space,” Story said. “And I think that other developers will rise to that occasion.”

Everett is also optimistic that Aakha’s permanent relocation will be the first of many from BioLabs at Pegasus Park.

“They are our first success story,” said Everett. “And we hope to have many other success stories like that.”