By Douglas Hanks
A small start-up company from a University of Miami eye surgeon has attracted seed money from Bausch+Lomb, giving it the kind of high-profile backing the university hopes will help jumpstart its new research park.
Dr. Richard Awdeh’s company, Cirle, employs six people at a 2,500-square-foot lab on the third floor of at the UM Life Science & Technology Park near the Jackson hospital campus. While a lone office building now, UM hopes to eventually erect multiple buildings there and make it a hub for the Miami area’s bio-tech sector.
Key will be UM doctors and researchers starting spin-off companies like Awdeh’s and housing them in the park. University officials said Cirle is the first to come out of the school’s prestigious Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, and Bausch+Lomb said it was the company’s first venture in South Florida, too.
“The ultimate goal here is, of course, to develop breakthrough technologies,’’ Dr. Calvin Roberts, chief medical officer for Bausch+Lomb, said in a ceremony celebrating Bausch+Lomb’s investment Wednesday morning.
Two of the five floors in the 2011 building remain vacant as the private developer that built the facility awaits major tenants. The University of Miami’s tissue bank occupies most of the two ground floors, while small offices like Cirle rent space on the third. Tax law governing non-profit hospitals bars doctors from starting spin-off ventures within their UM practices, and the new research building is designed to attract part-time ventures like Cirle.
The two-year-old company’s lab space features a coffeehouse-style blackboard, and on Wednesday was populated by young lab assistants, part of the start-up ethos that is supposed to fuel the research park’s “incubator” wing of shared lab equipment and office amenities. “Great things start small," Awdeh said.
Awdeh declined to describe the medical devices under development that attracted Bausch+Lomb’s venture dollars, or discuss the money involved. A handful of UM doctors have rented space in the building too, a leasing agent said, and Awdeh said he has another 2,500 square feet reserved for an expansion he hopes to complete in the coming months.