With a mission like no other, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC) aims to accelerate breakthroughs and opportunities for all. Made possible by a $2.6 billion public commitment, the MLSC launches funding programs, partnerships, and investments with a focus that is not just a single cluster, but a Commonwealth. We are home to an ecosystem that we’re building together. At the center of it all, we’re helping the life sciences move further, faster. Learn more about the MLSC’s funding programs and initiatives.
Funding for Early-Stage Companies
Frontiers Program: Supports high-risk translational research in areas with urgent healthcare challenges historically overlooked in value-based investing.
Internship Programs: These programs create hundreds of new internship opportunities each year for high school students, college students, and recent graduates interested in life sciences careers in Massachusetts.
Impact Catalyst: Sector-focused, non-dilutive seed-stage funding designed to catalyze investor syndicates and accelerate first institutional seed rounds.
Massachusetts Next Generation (MassNextGen) Initiative: Supports a broad network of underrepresented entrepreneurs through funding, coaching, and network building.
Talent
Pathmaker: Funding to support organizations that can build and scale career pathways that effectively prepare students for career opportunities in the life sciences.
Tax Incentive: Provides incentives to companies across Massachusetts to encourage long-term job growth and expansion on a statewide basis.
Women’s Health
Women’s Health Initiative: Supports efforts that increase the understanding of sex and gender differences in biology or developing solutions for diseases or conditions that affect women solely, disproportionately, or differently.
Women’s Health Collaboration: Supports collaborative projects that aim to improve the discovery, technical innovation, and/or analysis of datasets to answer pressing life science questions around women’s health.
Manufacturing
BioBoost: Supports companies creating or expanding biomanufacturing or medtech advanced manufacturing presence and provides support to real estate developers evaluating site readiness for potential life science manufacturing purposes in Massachusetts.
Access to Massachusetts Infrastructure
Research Infrastructure and Equipment: Grants to support the life sciences ecosystem through the purchase of cutting-edge research equipment available to researchers across the Commonwealth.
R.E.D. and D.A.T.A.: The MLSC offers two searchable databases of shared resources, the result of nearly two decades of state capital investments that have turned all of Massachusetts into one huge incubator. The free and public Research Equipment Database (R.E.D.), and the Database, Algorithms, Tools, and Analyses (D.A.T.A.) Repository allows companies, research institutions, and all other ecosystem stakeholders to find and access MLSC-funded equipment and digital assets.
Collaboration Between Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Life Sciences Companies
Biobank: Breaking barriers by establishing a disease-specific (Year 1: colorectal cancer and Alzheimer’s disease), accessible biobank driven by ecosystem feedback and need.
Bits to Bytes: Funds collaborative academic and industry translational research projects that generate and analyze large omics datasets to answer vital life science questions and train the next generation of data scientists in Massachusetts.
Neuroscience Consortium: Funds pre-clinical research focused on understanding Alzheimer’s and neurodegenerative diseases at Massachusetts research institutions.
Novel Therapeutic Delivery: Strives to capitalize and incentivize translational projects to address complex challenges in “therapeutic” delivery – from biomanufacturing, to targeted delivery, to biomaterials and more.
Women’s Health Collaboration: Supports collaborative projects that aim to improve the discovery, technical innovation, and/or analysis of datasets to answer pressing life science questions around women’s health.
