The Taystee Life Sciences Building in West Harlem, soon to be the home of the City Innovations Collaborative (CInC) life sciences incubator facility.
The City College of New York has received an Empire State Development grant of $4.5 million for its City Innovations Collaborative life sciences incubator facility.
The grant, announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul, is the final component needed to complete the construction of the $34 million facility – known as CInC – in West Harlem's Manhattanville Factory District.
CInC is a new regional innovation engine created by CCNY to seed, cultivate, and sustain a thriving regional life science ecosystem for New York City communities who have been historically underrepresented in this space. CInC will be an anchor tenant in the building, which is adjacent to the City College campus, and will support commercialization efforts for several new ventures concurrently.
These efforts will be aided by the work of the College’s master’s degree program in translational medicine, or MTM, which recently received a $1.325 million National Science Foundation grant as part of a convergent research and training study.
The success of the now eight-year-old MTM was accelerated by a $2.4 million gift from Seymour Moskowitz ’54 and Pearl Moskowitz in January 2020. The donation, one of many by the Moskowitzes over the years, enabled MTM to expand its education and training of cross-functional teams that address unmet healthcare needs.
CCNY’s existing partners include the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which provided a $15 million award last summer, and West Harlem-based Janus Property Company. In addition to providing substantial capital for the project, Janus is transforming the former Taystee bread factory at 450 W. 126th St. into the Taystee Life Sciences Building, a purpose-built facility for the life sciences.
CCNY has also received operational support from the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Build to Scale program.
CInC’s collaborative model will focus resources from many diverse stakeholders, including universities, governments, industry, investors, foundations, entrepreneurs, and patient advocacy groups. Selected innovation development projects and ventures should have the potential to drive positive health, societal, and economic impact for New Yorkers, particularly those from surrounding communities such as Harlem.
“CInC was created to address the critical gaps in resources for the CCNY/CUNY innovation ecosystems, which are still maturing as the institution continues to grow its research base,” said Senior Director of Innovation Management and Business Development Andrew Wooten, who is also president of CInC. “The resources required for innovation development are very specialized by stage of development and class of product. No single organization can do the work alone.”
“This grant will allow us to embark on a project of strategic importance to the College: building the capacity to deliver vital research in the life sciences to society in the form of medically useful innovation,” said CCNY President Vincent G. Boudreau. “As a college dedicated to addressing disparities of all kinds, we believe that developing this facility in Harlem to benefit the medically underserved and the economically under-resourced resonates deeply with our most closely held values.”
About the City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. This year, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign, ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.