The Bell Labs of biotech: Stuart Schreiber has billionaire support for new biomedical institute 

Every week, there is chat­ter of new routes to fund­ing drug de­vel­op­ment that ul­ti­mate­ly bring med­i­cines to pa­tients more quick­ly. On Fri­day, a group of bil­lion­aires of­fered up the lat­est route, un­veil­ing the cap­i­tal they’ve put be­hind a new bio­med­ical re­search in­sti­tute with broad am­bi­tions across tech­nolo­gies and dis­ease ar­eas.

Are­na BioWorks said Fri­day it’s “in­spired by the suc­cess of Bell Labs” and will lead new re­search ini­tia­tives and cre­ate for-prof­it biotech com­pa­nies “seam­less­ly un­der one roof.” It promis­es a quick­er trans­la­tion­al re­search mod­el, has the back­ing of big names, and plans to put sci­en­tists in the dri­ver’s seat and a foot­print in the in­dus­try’s beat­ing heart of Kendall Square in Cam­bridge, MA.

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