"The ambition is to become the first Vegas"

Jeffery Talbot, VP for Research at Roseman University of Health Sciences, sat down with Onyx to discuss the distributed biotech model, why nearly ten companies have landed in Las Vegas since March, and what Nevada still has to build.

Roseman Bioventures launched formally in March. What's the dynamic you're responding to?

Much of the excitement is around what I perceive to be - what I think many perceive to be - some changing dynamics in the life sciences industry, certainly in the US and perhaps globally. There are many factors underlying those changes, but much of it is around inflationary pressures put on companies and ongoing dynamics around capitalization. There is a higher incentive, perhaps a greater incentive than there has been in years past, for companies to find capital-efficient ways to continue to grow.

We believe, and we are experiencing, a bit of an - not a migration as much as an expansion of life science R&D, beginning to include non-traditional hubs. Nevada, and southern Nevada, is an ideal location for some of that activity. It is a very, maybe extremely, business-friendly economic environment. There is tremendous interest among stakeholders in this region to capture some of that as economic diversification, and life science startups are the ones to take advantage of it.

We've seen a steady flow of companies interested in maintaining their connection to the coastal hubs while bringing R&D and manufacturing to places like Nevada. That's really the genesis of Roseman Bioventures. We have 120,000 square feet. It's the largest dedicated life science incubator in Nevada, perhaps in the Intermountain West. That's premier lab space. We're developing an ecosystem here that's very connected to the coastal hubs - expertise, regulatory affairs, access to CROs and CDMOs.

This isn't pitched as a rival to Boston or San Diego so much as a split, with leadership staying on the coast and R&D moving. Can you give a worked example of a tenant that's made that split?

The word we would use is complementary. For the young life science company, we're complementing the resources and access a coastal hub might offer with some of the business-friendly elements of a non-coastal location.

We have a company out of UC Irvine where the technology arose in their academic enterprise, through their technology incubator. It's a medical device company - VenaVitals, which makes a wearable, continuous blood pressure monitoring device. They brought their R&D and manufacturing team here. The C-suite is in Southern California; R&D and manufacturing is in our facility.

This is a quantifiable example, and it's representative. While they were at Irvine's incubator, they were one of seven companies sharing a chemical fume hood, which is necessary for their technology. Here, for less cost, they were able to obtain an entire lab module that has its own chemical fume hood. Those are force multipliers. For a young company, that makes capital go farther. It's more human capacity with respect to the facilities and what they can accomplish with them. They're waiting on their 510(k) and they're starting clinical trial work at hospitals here in southern Nevada. They'll be pushing to market soon.

There are others. Regenicin, a company out of New Jersey, is autologous skin cell regeneration - the C-suite is in New Jersey, the R&D is here on our campus. There's a company out of Georgia Tech where the co-founder is still in Georgia and the other team is here. We have a pipeline of close to a dozen companies, some of which will move the entire company here and others are considering splitting. It affords a new, innovative approach that fits today's market.

How many companies are actually in the building today - and are they homegrown, or coming in from elsewhere?

Remember, we just launched in March. We're coming up on ten companies that are current resident companies or close to execution, and a pipeline of an additional dozen. What I tell my bosses is: we won't get all of them, and we won't get none of them. But the interest has been remarkable. It's been almost hard to keep up with companies that otherwise would have been located in a coastal hub.

It's more the latter than the former. We have captured an element of homegrown innovation - we have a couple of resident companies out of UNLV, with great technologies, and they're expanding and growing at Roseman Bioventures. But most of our interest has been companies that are not currently located here in southern Nevada and are trying to get here.

In the first half of 2026, roughly two-thirds of venture rounds went to companies already in the clinic. Preclinical companies are the ones struggling to raise and the ones most likely to chase cheaper lab space. Is that your target market?

We're certainly positioning ourselves more broadly, simply because we have premier space that can support a wide array of companies across thematic verticals - medical device, therapeutics, medtech. We have companies in the pipeline in each of those areas. But I certainly think we're particularly attractive to that niche of company that is looking to be very, very capital-efficient in their early phase of development.

Space like this usually starts as labs and offices with manufacturing as an aspiration. How concrete are the manufacturing plans?

That's a great question, and hard to predict. One dynamic I derive some comfort from is that we have so much space available that we can accommodate the one-employee bench company - the early, early-phase startup, bootstrapping or friends-and-family phase - all the way to a company that is Series A or Series B, is commercialized, and needs to expand. We have a remarkable facility. The university has committed tremendous resources to this initiative, and we're excited for what that means for these companies to be able to grow more efficiently while maintaining connection to those coastal areas.

Are the startups paying rent, or is this an equity deal? And if you're taking equity, you're wearing a venture capital hat - how are you screening?

To this point, the university has engaged in both types of relationships, and we will move as we grow over time. Our hope is to move toward equity positions in companies we're particularly interested in and excited about. But at this point it's predominantly lease relationships.

One of our resident companies would say that's a benefit of Roseman Bioventures - in Nevada, companies are able to more effectively manage controlling interests, and are less susceptible to losing that interest, because of how capital can be deployed here versus a Bay Area or a San Diego or a Boston, where a similar footprint may consume several times more capital.

Venture investment isn't an intentional part of our portfolio at this phase of our growth. We'll focus on that in the future. Right now we have a group of internal experts, and we're bringing on a managing director with over 30 years of experience in the biotech industry. We're also engaged with local stakeholders - local VC, local economic development entities, the city, the state of Nevada and others. That forms a team by which we can look at our ability to properly support companies as they come in. I'd say that's another feature that's a benefit for companies coming to our area.

What's the university's own financial exposure here - and what's the real cost differential for a startup choosing Nevada over the coast?

The 120,000 square feet is a building we have owned for a few years, so our capital expenditure already exists in a building that is usable now. The premier wet lab space within it also utilizes resources that support our academic mission - IRB and clinical trial support, preclinical research support services we're already using. That's a really nice fit for us, because it doesn't have to be capitalized separately for the Roseman Bioventures initiative. The resources the university is pouring into this are the assets of the space and what already exists at the university. It's significant, but it's not new.

On cost differentials, the anecdotes we're hearing from companies making the comparison are that they can do business at Roseman Bioventures for three to four times less than they'd be paying at a coastal hub. We look at each company individually when we talk about cost, because we're interested in supporting them as best we can. We don't publish rates yet.

So what's stopping Nevada becoming a genuine end-to-end rival to the coasts - and is that even the goal?

I don't know that that's our mission at Roseman Bioventures. I do think it's feasible. I think it's a viable possibility in the future, and some of that is time. Inflationary costs are making it very challenging to do business in coastal hubs. For younger startups, there are many advantages to considering emerging markets. The ability to be connected across distances is greater than it's ever been, and those dynamics make this possible.

Whether or not Vegas does it, it will happen. It will happen in other areas - I think we're seeing it happen in other areas. What appears to work for us is our proximity to both southern and northern California, plus the incentives for doing business in Nevada, and the logistics: it's a state that's easy to get to. This interest is organic and increasing, and Nevada is trying to be intentional about capturing it.

I don't know that the ambition is to become the next San Francisco, or Boston, or San Diego. I think the ambition is to become the first Vegas - to become a market that emerges because of these macro dynamics. And it's happening whether or not we do it.

Is the talent actually moving, or just the labs?

There's an increasing number of life science leaders, and others, simply moving to southern Nevada. It's not just a good place to do business, it's a good place to live, for personal financial reasons especially - again, comparing inflationary pressures on the coast versus here. We're finding scientists are willing to move, and other technical support too.

Heligenics is a local startup that would have left but stayed. Their CEO, Martin Schiller, would say that staying here has allowed him to maintain controlling interest in his company as it grew, and they're doing quite well. VenaVitals came in as a distributed model, but the CEO ended up moving here.

Nevada has its work to do to build a workforce. I don't know that it will ever rival the traditional hubs. But there's a flow that's coming.