About IALS

The Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS) was established in 2014, based on a total investment of more than $150 million from the Massachusetts Life Science Center (MLSC) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. IALS translates fundamental research into innovative product candidates, technologies, and services that deliver benefits to human health and well-being, serves as a catalyst and resource for ‘translational’ R&D activities, manages the centralized UMass Amherst Core Facilities/Collaboratories, strengthens campus venture mentoring and startup activities, and contributes to workforce development on the Amherst campus.

The Institute and three centers operate as a unit to execute the overall translational objectives of the campus. The Centers combine the deep and interdisciplinary expertise of more than 270 faculty-led research groups from over 28 departments and 6 schools and colleges, and provides various funding opportunities to advance research. The vision of the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring (CPHM) is to maximize our ability to quantify, model and understand individualized health and well-being, using knowledge gained to develop interventions that maximize human capabilities; the Models to Medicine Center (M2M) seeks to become the campus ‘engine’ for addressing unmet needs of disease model development, new therapeutic ‘target’ discovery, and diagnostics development to improve early disease detection; and the Center for Bioactive Delivery (CBD) aims to change the bioactive delivery field from a heuristic one to a predictive science, allowing the development of more effective delivery technologies with fewer undesirable side effects. 

IALS manages more than 30 Core Facilities, state-of-the-art laboratories, instrumentation, equipment, and world-class experts, that support a wide range of R&D projects — from device prototyping, precision manufacturing and roll-to-roll fabrication, to human motion and gait studies, calorimetry, magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy, EEG and sleep studies. Adjacent to these core facilities are “Collaboratories” — affordable, IP free, rentable wet lab space. These facilities are equally accessible to academic, government, and industry collaborators, including Massachusetts small businesses.

IALS provides venture mentoring and startup activities supporting the campus translational pipeline of pre-startups through spinout companies. The translational seed fund program has been expanded and is enabling a pipeline of more “mature” start-up companies well prepared to leverage their successes into external investments. Further expansion of translational efforts is enabled by the IALS-led campus-wide consortium that won an U.S. National Science Foundation Accelerating Research Translation (NSF-ART) (#2331351) award. UMass is one of only 17 institutions to win an ART in the first year of this program.

Lastly, IALS contributes to Massachusetts workforce development through its many student training programs. The Core Summer Internship has trained over 200 undergraduate and graduate students with hands-on technical and soft-skills training. Partnering with the Isenberg School of Management, has trained over 100 MBA students through the IALS Venture Development program. The Translational Graduate Student Assistantship has provided support to over 20 emerging researchers across the three Centers. 

IALS leverages the power of innovation and translational research for the common good. 

To explore how IALS can help you advance your goals, please fill out this request form.