BioCiTi LABS- Africa's first open access biotech lab

Setting up a biotech lab is very costly and can be the bottleneck to start something new especially in LMICs in Africa. BioCiTi is taking that off the hands of prospective biotech entrepreneurs to make sure that businesses can transition the so-called chasms of product development and the business cycle. I interviewed Anesu Conrad Moyo (PhD.), Laboratory Manager at BioCiTi Laboratory, and Dheepak Maharajh, BioCiTi executive cluster head on this episode of the Africa Biotech Conversations podcast. From a joint desire to create a biotech future for South Africa, ONEBIO (a previous guest on the ABCs podcast) and CiTi, the oldest tech incubator on the African continent created the nonprofit company, BioCiTi in 2019. The shared model with the open access labs has been a game changer for the biotech ecosystem, as it's the first open access lab on the African continent. As an open access lab they do not take equity nor look to take any of the intellectual property of their tenants. If startups go to a university, they need to look at sharing the intellectual property. Contract research organizations tend to charge them a substantial amount of money to do the research on their behalf. BioCiTi is making impact not only to startups and entrepreneurs, but across the entire length and breadth of the biotech ecosystem in South Africa. The BioCiTi model makes it easier for biotech entrepreneurs to pay rental access to their lab, have full access to all the equipment and have a freedom to develop and refine their products and concepts in their own timeframes. BioCiTi also offers contractual research services to people that do not have the scientific technical know-how but have an idea. The other emerging need is that larger businesses, SMEs, and even medium-sized businesses have a need to access a lab, but they don't need to have their own lab. BioCiTi can partner with these businesses in research and development without having to outlay that large amount of costs. Thanks to the amount of innovation that is coming out from universities, the increased interest in setting up biotech businesses globally post-COVID, and with a lot of businesses using the COVID vaccine development in the Western Cape province of South Africa as a springboard for emerging into the biotech sector, BioCiTi has seen massive growth over its 3 years of existence. BioCiTi will be moving to bigger and better premises on the 1st of June 2022 to expand their labs even further and also add additional equipment that can help entrepreneurs navigate to the next level of their business. Their continuous growth is dependent on securing funding. Dheepak aims to grow open access labs outside of the Western Cape province, as well as into the African continent. Mzansi Meat and De Novo Dairy are two of many tenants at BioCiti currently. Listen to this episode of the ABCs podcast and find out about: internship opportunities, criteria to become a tenant, for graduating from the program, and to access their thriving alumni post-graduation, models for purchasing niche equipment by incubatees or tenant, what skills and personality traits are required to thrive in a biotechnology environment, some of the trends that Dheepak and Anesu see coming up in biotech in Africa, and the existing gaps in South Africa's biotech ecosystem that you can fill to enable a thriving bioeconomy.