Johnson & Johnson have announced the opening of the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center in Boston. As part of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, the goal of the Boston Innovation Center is to advance healthcare by catalyzing collaborations in science and technology between regional innovators and the Johnson & Johnson family of companies across a diverse spectrum of early-stage opportunities.

The Boston Innovation Center is home to a team of business, science and transaction experts who are focused on identifying and building novel early-stage collaborations with emerging companies, entrepreneurs and academic centers across eastern North America. This team has full and broad deal-making capabilities, with flexibility to adapt deal structures to match early-stage needs and opportunities.

"With the establishment of our Boston Innovation Center, we look forward to further fostering collaboration with some of the world's leading scientists, renowned academic centers and influential entrepreneurs to enable future innovations that will advance human health,” said Paul Stoffels, M.D., Johnson & Johnson chief scientific officer and worldwide chairman, pharmaceuticals.

The Boston Innovation Center's first collaborations and new initiatives include a research alliance with The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to advance the scientific understanding of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and the discovery of next generation therapeutic solutions; a collaboration with Rodin Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on applying insights of epigenetics, to advance novel therapeutics for neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease; a collaboration with Vedanta to advance a novel class of therapies that modulate pathways of interaction between the human microbiome and the host immune system; and the establishment of Janssen Labs at the LabCentral facility in the Kendall Square biotech hub.

Johnson & Johnson opened an innovation center in London in March, one in California in early June, and plans to open one in Shanghai by the end of the year.