Tee Labs Incubator Officially Launches
On September 16, Tee Labs, a biopharmaceutical innovation incubator managed by Shanghai Tee Labs Biotechnology, held its opening ceremony. Located in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, the incubator is dedicated to building an international biopharmaceutical innovation service platform. It provides startups with comprehensive support, including R&D facilities, supply services, operational management, investment, and financing, to co-create breakthrough technologies and products with entrepreneurs that improve human health.
At the opening ceremony, Ms. Jun Fu, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone Zhangjiang Administration Bureau; Dr. Jing Ma, Chairman of the Scientific Committee of TF Capital; and Dr. Lin Ni, Senior Partner at TF Capital and General Manager of the Tee Labs Incubator, delivered speeches. Distinguished guests from the venture capital and business communities, including representatives from Fudan University, Zhangjiang Group, Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-tech Park Development Co., Ltd., ZJ Venture Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, Hillhouse Capital, and Temasek China, were in attendance.
Ms. Jun Fu, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone Zhangjiang Administration Bureau, pointed out that Zhangjiang currently offers significant support for biopharmaceutical innovation in terms of both space and institutional frameworks. In the future, the Pudong New Area will further deepen legislation for the biopharmaceutical sector and is currently working with customs authorities to research and optimize import-export systems. It is hoped that a continuous stream of new enterprises will be established in the incubator, achieve rapid growth, and be listed soon.
Dr. Jing Ma, a toxicology expert and Chairman of the Scientific Committee of TF Capital, has witnessed the growth of TF Capital over the years. She noted that when scientists arrive with just their ideas in a briefcase to innovate, they need support from the government, from funds, and from the industry. An asset-light R&D model, combining venture capital, intellectual property, and CRO-based R&D outsourcing, is now demonstrating its high efficiency and low-cost advantages. Tee Labs is precisely in step with this evolution in the biopharmaceutical industry. She expressed her hope that more pharmaceutical unicorns will emerge from Zhangjiang, and that patients in China will be able to use medicines developed in China.
Dr. Lin Ni, Senior Partner at TF Capital, believes that with the advancement of life sciences and the deepening application of computer science and digitalization, the research and development of biopharmaceuticals and biotechnology are gradually transitioning from an era of manual workshops to an era of engineering and industrialization. This will be an industrial revolution that creates life, makes the world more vibrant, and fosters prosperity. She explained the meaning behind the name Tee Labs: a “Tee” is the stand that holds a golf ball at tee-off. The incubated companies are the small balls heading towards the future and the world, and Tee Labs is the small but solid T-shaped stand that supports them.
The establishment of Tee Labs received strong support from Mr. Wu Qiang, Vice District Mayor of Shanghai’s Pudong New Area, and the Shanghai Zhangjiang Science City Construction Management Office. Relying on TF Capital’s ecosystem resources within the biopharmaceutical industry, it is independently operated and managed by Tee Labs PharmaTech, a wholly-owned subsidiary of TF Capital. Centered on serving early-stage innovative projects in biopharmaceuticals, the incubator has built 2,500 square meters of modern, international, and innovative space. It has established a series of professional platforms, including a molecular biology lab, chemistry lab, cell culture lab, microscopy imaging lab, and a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) lab, enabling it to provide comprehensive “space + investment + incubation + R&D” support to resident companies.
In addition to providing physical space, Tee Labs also offers over 200 types of general-purpose instruments for incubated companies, including -80°C freezers, multichannel pipettes, PCR machines, and electrophoresis and blotting systems, as well as a large number of smaller devices, truly enabling a “turnkey” laboratory experience. It is also equipped with more than ten types of specialized and high-throughput equipment, such as Biacore, high-speed refrigerated centrifuges, an LTQ system for mass spectrometry, a QPix high-throughput microbial colony picking system, a FLIPR high-throughput CCD fluorescence imaging analyzer, a flow cytometer, a fluorescence microscope, a high-throughput nucleic acid workstation, an MSD electrochemiluminescence immunoassay system, and large liquid nitrogen tanks as shared instruments. With its high-quality service system, Tee Labs has attracted several outstanding companies since its trial operation, and is becoming a new hub for cultivating Zhangjiang’s biopharmaceutical enterprises.
The first batch of resident companies includes Basecamp Bio, Shanghai ShouTi Biotechnology Co., Ltd., and Uscene Biosciences (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., among several others.
In the future, Tee Labs is committed to growing alongside entrepreneurs, building a top-tier domestic incubator, and accelerating innovation in the biotechnology sector.
At the opening ceremony, guest representatives cut the ribbon for the incubator’s launch, officially announcing that Tee Labs is now in full operation.
As a representative of the first batch of resident companies, Dr. Raymond Stevens, founder of Basecamp Bio and the iHuman Institute at ShanghaiTech University, gave an introduction to his company.
About Tee Labs：
Tee Labs is an industrial incubator wholly-owned and independently operated by TF Capital, dedicated to the pioneering fields of medicine, including new drug discovery, diagnostics, and personalized medicine that incorporate artificial intelligence and digital solutions. Tee Labs provides comprehensive support, including R&D facilities, corporate functions, supply chain integration, and financial backing, to deeply empower entrepreneurial teams and accelerate their R&D progress. The laboratories are equipped with basic general-purpose experimental equipment as well as shared equipment platforms, significantly shortening the setup phase for startups in terms of facilities and equipment, allowing companies to focus on their core R&D work.
About TF Capital:
Founded in 2014, TF Capital is a venture capital firm focused on the life sciences, primarily investing in promising early and growth-stage companies. Through a diversified and strategic approach and by selecting high-quality partners, TF Capital aims to seize opportunities in the rapid development of China’s life sciences sector. The investment team has many years of experience and industry resources in these fields and hopes to grow rapidly alongside its portfolio companies.
About Shanghai Basecamp Biotechnology Co., Ltd.:
Basecamp Bio
Basecamp Bio is a technology platform company with unique expertise and analytical capabilities in next-generation structure-based drug discovery. It can tackle the most challenging protein targets, including membrane proteins, protein-protein interactions, and other difficult drug discovery targets. The scientists at Basecamp Bio have a powerful technology platform that combines experimental biophysics with state-of-the-art computational methods to discover novel lead compounds and efficiently and rapidly transform them into superior clinical drug candidates.
About Shanghai ShouTi Biotechnology Co., Ltd.:
ShouTi Biotechnology
As a clinical-stage global drug discovery company, ShouTi is focused on driving a revolution in accessible and effective medicines. The company’s goal is to develop innovative, best-in-class small molecule drugs for chronic diseases targeting GPCRs, transforming expensive, unstable, and difficult-to-transport and -administer biologic therapies into medicines that can be accessed by patients globally.
About Usynova
Usynova was founded in January 2020. Its core team members come from multinational pharmaceutical companies and leading domestic CROs, possessing deep project development experience in the fields of small molecule and antibody drug discovery. The company currently has an R&D team of over 30 people, with more than 80% holding Ph.D. or Master’s degrees.
The company focuses on two major areas, autoimmune diseases and cancer, to address unmet clinical needs by developing first-in-class or best-in-class new drugs with proprietary intellectual property and global rights. It currently has more than 10 programs in its pipeline, covering major disease areas such as oncology, autoimmune diseases, and osteoarthritis. Among them, UA007 is being developed for multiple indications and has already initiated one Phase II clinical trial and one Phase I clinical trial.