Lilly opens fifth ‘gateway’ lab on Torrey Pines Mesa

Corey Dambacher was working in Oregon when he discovered a type of ribonucleic acid capable of creating unique types of proteins that express themselves on the surfaces of cancer cells. It’s just the kind of target that makes a researcher’s eyes widen with possibility.

But moving from a promising set of cellular signals to an effective new drug is exceedingly difficult. To pursue that goal, Dambacher and his friend Imad Ajjawi packed up and moved south to a futuristic-looking building on the Torrey Pines mesa.

Their young company, Rybodyn, occupies one of 15 combination lab and office spaces that together make up Lilly Gateway Labs, a facility that celebrated its grand opening Friday.

Part of the One Alexandria Square development on Science Park Road, the property includes nearly 90,000 square feet of contemporary offices that have separate space for each corporate tenant but also access to shared resources from genetic sequencers to a high-resolution confocal microscope, one of just four in the United States.

“There’s microscopy and centrifuges and freezers, and even a vending machine for lab supplies and reagents,” said Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer and president of the company’s research laboratories and immunology divisions. “You swipe your card, and you get what you need because we stock it.”

It’s the fifth such hub hosting early-stage biotechnology companies that Lilly has built since 2019. The first was in San Francisco, and additional grand openings have occurred in Boston and Beijing. San Francisco’s second location opened before San Diego got its first.

Skovronsky said that Lilly, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, does not require any commitment of intellectual property or future drug development rights from its gateway tenants. And these early-stage companies can access Lilly resources and expertise at lower prices, leveraging the multibillion-dollar company’s purchasing power.

“If they need something, they talk to our scientists, and often that person becomes the point of connection to the rest of Lilly,” Skovronsky said. “Say, for example, one of these companies needed to make a monoclonal antibody but didn’t know how to do it.

“We’ll bring someone to talk to you, and oftentimes the answer is, we can do it for you.”

An “ExploR&D” program allows startups to purchase services from Lilly, even if what’s required is not located anywhere near San Diego.

It was this ability to have a close relationship with an organization that knows how to make drugs that succeed in the market that ultimately convinced Rybodyn’s founders to move to San Diego.

Millions of dollars are required to prove that a new idea works in real patients, and it generally takes years to conduct the basic research and clinical trials necessary to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

When it came time to begin that journey, Dambacher, with a doctorate in biochemistry and biology from Scripps Research, reached out to Ajjawi, a biochemist with a business degree from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego. Working with additional founding partners, they formed Rybodyn, a company created to explore those potential targets, a genomic niche they call the “dark proteome.”

Dambacher said he and Ajjawi, both living at the time in the Pacific Northwest, missed the collaborative vibe that San Diego’s biotech community is known for. Ajjawi previously worked at the J. Craig Venter Institute.

“We’re deep tech people, we’re not necessarily these clinical developers, so it’s very complementary what Lilly brings to the table,” Ajjawi said.

“They’re more innovative than most pharma,” Dambacher added. “They’re willing to take bigger risks at an earlier stage than most pharma.”

The gateway lab project is nearly half full already, with seven of 15 research suites already occupied. Lilly has a long history of developing drugs in San Diego, with a main research and development campus on Campus Point Drive just east of Interstate 5. The company credits its West Coast headquarters with developing six FDA-approved drugs.