Aspiring entrepreneurs at the University of California celebrate the first birthday of an unusual biotech incubator this month. The QB3 Garage lets them rent the equivalent of a single lab bench, right in the heart of a premier research institute.

Incubators are usually located near university labs, but rarely in the same building. Yet in a five-storey building at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), six tiny companies split a 232-square-metre space, which includes a common laboratory plus private sections for offices or labs.

Named after the garage in Palo Alto where Bill Hewlett and David Packard launched their business in 1939, the QB3 Garage is the brainchild of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3), which has sites at UCSF and at the Berkeley and Santa Cruz campuses. The state government funds QB3 to help academics commercialize research.

The Garage helps companies through the transition from research idea to new business entity by keeping them close to potential academic collaborators and by leasing very small spaces, so firms don't pay rent for space they don't need. Also, the Garage doesn't take equity or intellectual property from its tenants.

The two founders of MynoSys Cellular Devices, which is developing a microknife for cellular surgery, rent the Garage's smallest space, 12 square metres. “We could probably do every-thing we're doing now at a different place, but it would cost us more, and not just in terms of money,” says ophthalmologist David Sretavan. He adds that the location aids academic collaborations and the intellectual environment fosters innovation.

Tenants must be affiliated with research at QB3 or the university, their work must have biomedical applications, and QB3 spin-offs have priority as space is limited. Most tenants are funded by small business grants from the US government.

Leases last a mere 18 months. The goal is to give nascent companies a chance to perform proof-of-concept experiments or create prototypes before finding additional investment and moving on, explains Douglas Crawford, associate director of QB3. It's worked so far for the first tenant, Fluxion Biosciences, which got seed financing in September and plans to move to larger quarters in 2007.

Meanwhile, Crawford says he's had to turn down five applicants in as many weeks for lack of space, and other institutions have contacted him about starting garages on their campuses.