Harvard Griffin GSAS Biotech Club and Hatch.Bio Labs Open Submissions for Fall Pitch Competition
About the event
The Harvard Griffin GSAS Biotech Club and Hatch.Bio Labs are now accepting pitch decks for this fall's pitch competition. Four companies will be selected to pitch live on Wednesday, October 21, at Harvard Medical School's Tosteson Medical Education Center, competing for three months of dedicated lab bench space at Hatch.Bio Labs. Submissions close Wednesday, October 7 and are open to life science founders who are current or former Harvard affiliates.
Bridging the gap from the university lab to a company lab
Leaving an academic lab often means losing access to equipment, safety infrastructure, and operational support all at once. Rebuilding that from scratch takes capital and months that most early teams do not yet have access to. The prize offers one piece of that: three months at a dedicated bench, with equipment and operational support already in place.
The prize includes dedicated bench space at Hatch.Bio Labs. The Somerville facility at 100 Chestnut Street has a shared equipment collection and an on-site vivarium. Residents are onboarded with our dedicated team and through myHatch, the Hatch.Bio resident app, which handles safety training and equipment reservations before the first day at the bench. The Hatch.Bio operations team takes care of equipment maintenance, repairs, and facility logistics, so the team can get booted up quickly.
The winning team also gets a place in a community of 25 resident life science companies working across therapeutics, synthetic biology, diagnostics, computational biology, and other fields. That means access to Hatchy Hours every thursday, Bagel Friday every Friday, and training and Lunch and Learns with key partners and vendors.
What past winners have built
Since 2022, Hatch.Bio Labs has offered lab bench space as a prize through pitch programs with Nucleate Boston and the MIT Biotech Group.
BioSens8 won the Nucleate New England Final Pitch Showcase in 2022. Led by CEO Uroš Kuzmanović, the team is developing wearable biosensors that track hormone levels in real time. Since then, BioSens8 has received an NSF SBIR Phase II award and was named an honoree in Fast Company's 2025 World Changing Ideas Awards.
Absentia Labs won the 2025 MIT Biotech Group pitch competition. Farhan Khodaee, PhD, Rohola Zandie, PhD, and Robert Betancort founded the company to build AI models of human biology. In July 2026, Absentia Labs announced that its Digital Liver Model, which predicts drug-induced liver injury, had become the first AI-driven drug development tool accepted into the FDA's Drug Development Tool Qualification Program.
Pitch event details
This fall's winning company has an opportunity for the same boost. The four selected companies will pitch live in front of an audience, with refreshments served before the event.
Date: Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Time: 6:00 to 8:00 PM ET
Location: TMEC 227 Mini Amphitheater, Tosteson Medical Education Center, Harvard Medical School, 260 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115
Submit a pitch deck by October 7
