One evening in November, a class of about 30 WashU graduate students trickled onto the Cortex campus to learn more about BioGenerator Ventures, the investment arm of the bio-sciences ecosystem nonprofit BioSTL. They were met there by James McCarter, the new head of BioGenerator, and by the end of the night’s discussions, one fact about these students had come to bother him: Most, he concluded, had never even heard of BioGenerator before taking the course that arranged the visit—and this was a course on entrepreneurship.
“Nearly half of our investment opportunities are coming out of WashU, yet we are not well known there,” says McCarter. “We’re going to change that.”
McCarter, a major player in St. Louis’ bioscience industry, assumed his role in October and is planning a storytelling blitz for 2025. Whether it’s speeches, podcasts, videos, newsletters, social media, or panel discussions, McCarter wants to “vastly increase” his group’s visibility. One message he wants to drive home: BioGenerator is clearly onto something. Its companies have received more than $2.7 billion in capital from over 250 venture-capital and private-equity sources, which represents 60:1 leverage on the $44 million that BioGenerator has invested—and 85 percent of the outside capital has come from outside St. Louis. There have been several successful exits, too—Confluence Life Sciences and CoverCress, for example, have both been acquired by larger companies—and more exits are likely on the way. But McCarter’s second message is that the engine could churn even faster with more fuel. Says McCarter: “There’s more opportunity to invest in than we have dollars for.”
McCarter sees untapped potential particularly at WashU Medicine, which both this year and last garnered the second-highest amount of research funding among all U.S. medical schools from the National Institutes of Health. That prowess can be juxtaposed with the fact that, in 2022, Heartland Forward, a so-called think-and-do tank in Bentonville, Arkansas, issued a report finding that WashU writ large ranked 50th overall on an index of university tech transfer and innovation. So the innovation powerhouse that is the med school doesn’t always spawn new companies—and that’s what BioGenerator exists to help with.
Several caveats are in order on that score. First, the top-ranking schools on that Heartland Forward list have large engineering programs, so the comparison between, say, Carnegie Mellon University and WashU is not apples-to-apples. Second, the goal of NIH research funding is to “enhance life and to reduce illness and disability,” and commercialization is only one way of doing that. (Other ways include knowledge dissemination, which by itself can have a great impact, McCarter says, adding that many of WashU’s Nobel Prize winners fall in that category.)
A third caveat is that a transformation is already underway at WashU’s Office of Technology Management/Tech Transfer (OTM). Two decades ago, it was unleashing two or three startups a year; that number has since risen to ten. According to OTM’s most recent impact report, between 2014 and 2024, startup licenses and license agreements doubled, patent filings nearly doubled, and invention disclosures grew by 85 percent. The OTM has gone from “a pretty minimal effort to pretty darn good at what they do,” McCarter says. “And now they need to scale it up. We have a lot further to go relative to the success of our research base.”
What’s at stake here is not just St. Louis’ ability to tap into a reservoir of innovation; it’s also the ability to lure the nation’s top biomedical talent. Simply put, the stars of the field want to know what kind of help they’d have in commercializing their research. “In the past six to eight years or so, we definitely have seen growing interest from faculty recruits in the infrastructure we provide,” says Nichole Mercier, the OTM’s managing director. In fact, she adds, it “can be a differentiating factor” in recruits’ decision to join the faculty.
Off campus, McCarter also wants to reach out to investors. Some of the 250 made a one-time investment five years ago; he wants to reengage them. As for local investors, he wants to give them confidence in BioGenerator and thereby get “additional dollars off the sidelines.” And those dollars need not necessarily flow to fledgling companies per se. Cortex is “space-limited again,” McCarter says, “so people who may want to invest in real-estate as opposed to investing in startups have the opportunity to build lab and greenhouse spaces that are needed by the ecosystem. They’re not necessarily high-risk, high-reward investments, but they can provide very good returns.”
McCarter acknowledges that Cortex is no Kendall Square—the innovation district in Boston serving Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he points out that Kendall Square seemed less imposing 30 years ago. “Ecosystems are built over time,” he says. “We shouldn’t think the incumbent players were always dominant. They were built by decisions that people made to invest in those regions. And likewise we can make those decisions.”
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