Portal Innovations to call Houston its third home in expansion of $25M incubator, lab space model

Portal Innovations, a biotech investor and lab operator, is spreading its blueprint to Houston as it looks to seed new Texas startups with $25 million and house their early-stage teams in a 30,000-square foot lab space.

Led by entrepreneur and Pyxis Oncology chair John Flavin, the Chicago-born and Boston-copied firm will open the Houston lab and office space in the second quarter of next year, after expanding to Boston this year. It plans to follow a similar model in Atlanta next summer.

As evidence of the incubator’s proximity to Texas’ top medical institutions, the Portal space will be located a floor below the Jim Allison Institute. Part of the Texas Medical Center ecosystem, Portal will live among the University of Texas MD Anderson Center, UT Health, Texas A&M, Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine, in addition to other institutions.

Sarah Hein

The latter is behind a new CAR-T cell therapy company seeded by Portal. March Biosciences is one of the firm’s first investments in Texas and already has an autologous CD5 CAR-T in Phase I testing. March Bio hopes to close a “sizable” Series A by year’s end to take the cell therapy, dubbed MB-105, into Phase II testing in T-cell lymphoma next year, CEO Sarah Hein told Endpoints News.

The biotech, named after “the best time of year” in Houston, also has rights to a Baylor-invented CD7 cell therapy also in Phase I testing, but the startup’s scope is focused on the first program for now, she added. The academic leaders behind the biotech are Baylor associate professor and March scientific chief Max Mamonkin, and Malcolm Brenner, a Baylor professor who has led CAR-T work for years, including collaborations with Celgene and bluebird bio. March’s pipeline also includes an allogeneic program in the discovery phase.

March’s less than $3 million seed round — a nod to its capital efficiency, Hein said — is an example of Portal’s investing thesis, which entails early-stage investments from seed through Series B. Oncology, autoimmune, inflammation, synthetic biology and cell and gene therapy are some of the key areas Portal will look to invest in, Flavin said in an interview.

John Flavin

“If you look out over the course of the next decade, similar to the thesis that we have in Chicago and in other emerging markets like Atlanta,” Flavin said, “is there’s a new wave of innovators coming into the ecosystem in Texas and Houston, in particular, at the university level and more of those faculty innovators are interested in commercializing their innovation.”

Portal laid its foundation in Chicago, where it has two spaces in the bustling tech scene of Fulton Market, and is now replicating that in Boston, where it’s found a home in the former Boston Globe headquarters, a floor below Flagship Pioneering’s ProFound Therapeutics, Ampersand Biomedicines and other startups out of the Moderna founder. In Houston, it’s leveraging MD Anderson’s partnership with Resilience to offer manufacturing services to its portfolio, Flavin said.

“This is kind of bringing a Seaport feel, if you will, if I could get the best analog,” Flavin said. “[It’s] this new campus wherein you’re creating the receptor points where faculty can interact with entrepreneurs, with VCs, large companies, etc.”

He said the region has had a relative paucity of early-stage investing infrastructure for biomedical startups. Albeit further south in the state, Flavin pointed to retinal-focused cell therapy company CiRC Biosciences, a Portal and Paragon investment, moving up to Chicago.

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