Mission & Vision
The Harvard Life Labs were established to provide the founders of new life sciences companies the business and scientific support to progress their ideas into products and ventures that improve human health.
History
Dedicated in the fall of 2016, the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab is a shared laboratory space for high-potential life sciences and biotech startups founded by Harvard faculty, alumni, students, and postdoctoral scholars. The Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab is contributing to a thriving start-up community in Allston by seeding the campus with early-stage scientific ventures. Together with the i-lab and Launch Lab, the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab fosters the cross-disciplinary approach to entrepreneurship that will enable deeper impact and outcomes. “We are so very grateful to Judy and Steve for their gift that made this project possible. And we are equally grateful for their vision of having Allston become a life sciences cluster and their understanding of the need for lab space to support Boston as a hub for biotechnology ventures,” said Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria. Harvard President Drew Faust added, “The Life Lab is a vital building block in Harvard’s efforts to create an innovation hub in Allston that encourages our students and faculty to explore and nurture ideas that lead to new knowledge, new products, new services and perhaps even new industries.”
The Blavatnik Life Lab is a centerpiece of the Harvard Medical School Therapeutics Initiative, which aims to help HMS researchers transform their most promising fundamental biological discoveries into high-impact medicines faster, more efficiently, and more affordably. The initiative is a sweeping effort to advance therapeutics research, accelerate translation of discoveries into medicines, and train the inventors of future medicines.The new lab will operate as a sibling lab to the Harvard Business School’s Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab in Allston as part of Harvard University’s ecosystem of Innovation Labs. This collaboration will help cement a partnership between HMS and HBS focused on life science innovation, as the two schools work to provide business and scientific support to companies at both facilities.The lab is one of the key elements supported by a 2018 gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation that provided $200 million to accelerate the pace of therapeutic discovery and support initiatives aimed at solving some of humanity’s most acute biomedical challenges.