LabCentral, the nonprofit incubator that built a new model for coworking in biotech and became a life sciences anchor in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, will have its first new leader since its founding.
Chief operating officer Maggie O’Toole, who was employee No. 1 when LabCentral launched in 2013, will take over as CEO on May 1. LabCentral’s cofounder Joannes Fruehauf, the chief executive for the past 12 years, will take a new role as executive chairman.
LabCentral companies have raised more than $20 billion in funding and created more than 7,000 jobs in Massachusetts since its founding.
“We have really changed the way that people build biotech companies,” said Fruehauf, 55, who designed LabCentral as a way for cash-starved startups to save time and money by sharing infrastructure and lab equipment. “We proposed a new model that seemed crazy and outrageous at the time and it’s now being copied all over.”
Fruehauf said he’s stepping away from day-to-day management to spend more time on the global expansion of his two other businesses, for-profit BioLabs and Mission BioCapital, a venture capital firm.
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The change at the top comes as LabCentral, which has nurtured the growth of 278 life sciences companies over the past decade, grapples with the industry’s slowdown. The startups it attracts have been struggling to raise capital amid mounting uncertainty over the future of federal funding and regulation under the Trump administration.
O’Toole, 56, who worked at about a dozen startups before joining LabCentral, has been deeply involved in its operations and growth since its founding. She’s been responsible for space design, operations at six facilities, and community programming where entrepreneurs and researchers can network, swap tips, and share best practices.
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A major goal in her new role, she said, is to help address “pain points” for member companies at a time of transition in the life sciences sector. Among other steps, she’s working to match them with investors, including many of the drug giants that are LabCentral sponsors.
Just last month, one of LabCentral’s member companies, MIT-founded Gensaic, which uses AI-powered protein design to improve the tissue targeting of therapies, signed an investment deal worth as much as $354 million from Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk.
O’Toole said she’s also been talking with others in the sector about finding ways to offset the impacts of ongoing cuts in funding for medical research by the National Institutes for Health and other agencies.
“In light of some of the challenges going on in the industry,” O’Toole said, “I really want to find the right way for us to support our companies. ... I want to think of creative ways that we can offset these challenges and not have innovation be limited as a result of the funding gap.”
Fruehauf, who immigrated from Germany, said he’s also concerned about whether the United States will continue to be the engine for scientific breakthroughs that has drawn scientists from around the globe.
“The basic science machine that’s been going on very successfully over many decades has been put in jeopardy,” he said. “We hope and we believe that it will become evident to the decision makers that it is in our common interest to not undermine this area where American leads. ... The innovation enterprise in this country is the envy of the world.”
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LabCentral has expanded from its initial site at 700 Main St. in Kendall Square, built with the help of two grants totaling $10 million from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. It now owns or manages a half-dozen biotech coworking spaces spanning 243,000 square feet in Cambridge and Boston. They include a pair of lab incubators it manages for Harvard in Allston and the Longwood Medical Area in Boston.
More recently, however, occupancy rates are down at LabCentral and across Kendall Square and other Massachusetts biotech clusters. LabCentral abandoned plans for more sites even as it announced it was opening a new AI BioHub within its original 700 Main St. site in a partnership with C10 Labs. That operation was financed with a $1.9 million grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.
O’Toole said she doesn’t foresee a major shakeup at LabCentral but wants to improve its “concierge level of service” to the startups that work there until they advance to the stage where they need larger spaces.
Even as she’s managed LabCentral operations, O’Toole, a former college swimmer who competes in triathlons, has been an evangelist for the LabCentral model around the world, visiting with life sciences innovators in far-flung locales from Korea and China to Sweden and Australia.
She’s also hosted hundreds of delegations from across the country and overseas that have visited LabCentral on trips to Cambridge over the years. Just last week, she met with 20 visitors from Oslo.
“They were trying to understand the secret of Kendall Square,” she said.
Robert Weisman can be reached at [email protected].