J&J moves closer to science community

Johnson & Johnson is setting up four centres around the world to scope out early-stage acquisitions, partnerships and investment opportunities.

The innovation centres – in San Francisco, London, China and Boston – will connect business development executives from J&J’s drug, device and consumer units with local scientists and entrepreneurs.

The idea follows similar actions by Pfizer, Sanofi and Merck and Co.

J&J, which has made nine acquisitions over 12 months, joined with Index Ventures and GlaxoSmithKline earlier this year to form a $200 million fund to invest in early biotechnology.

“The objective is to strengthen significantly our capabilities to bring on board more products from the biotechnology and academic community,” said Paul Stoffels, J&J’s worldwide chairman of pharmaceuticals.

He added that the company would assemble experts on R&D, licensing and investment, business capital and legal intellectual property at the centres to facilitate deal-making.

Lazaridis opens new research centre

Mike Lazaridis, whose invention of the BlackBerry smartphone redefined the way people send e-mail, is drawing inspiration from the early days of computing for his next act.

Backed by his $100 million donation, the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre opened last week in Waterloo, Ontario, aiming to recreate the conditions that made AT&T’s Bell Labs a hive of innovation in the 1960s and which laid the groundwork for Silicon Valley.

The research centre is designed to produce breakthroughs in the science and technology of things approaching the size of an atom. It is “absolutely” going to be the Bell Labs of the 21st century, Mr Lazaridis says.

He is devoting most of his time to get the centre off the ground and to form a research cluster with the Institute for Quantum Computing and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, both founded with more than $250 million of his own money and additional funds he helped to raise. The facilities will be enough to lure the brightest minds in the field to Canada, he adds.