The San Diego Union-Tribune reports Thursday that Pfizer Inc. has signed up the first tenant for its incubator — a research space on its campus in the San Diego suburb of La Jolla. The tenant, a professor at the nearby Scripps Institute, will be working on antibody technology with a two-year ride courtesy of Pfizer.

The idea behind the incubator — as well as the one Biogen Idec Inc. is starting across the country in Cambridge, Mass. — is to provide the parent company with an additional source of new drugs for their ever-evolving pipelines, as TheDeal.com reported last month. Like movie scripts or high school baseball players, most drug research programs never hit the big time, so the bigger the pool of candidates, the better.

But will these new corporate drug incubators attract enough talent? The drug firms are offering a couple million dollars of support in exchange for first crack at rights to the work at the end of the incubation period. A big question: If Pfizer passes on a drug it has been incubating for two years, would anyone else want it? It also remains to be seen if Pfizer and Biogen Idec grant their tenants the independence they would enjoy in traditional incubators tied to academia or regional development. —Alex Lash 

See San Diego Union-Tribune story
See June 22 story on TheDeal.com

Tags: Biotech, pharmaceutical, healthcare, medicine, vc, venture+capital