BioGenerator wants to build more St. Louis companies

One evening in November, a class of about 30 WashU graduate students trickled onto the Cortex campus to learn more about BioGenerator Ventures, the investment arm of the bio-sciences ecosystem nonprofit BioSTL. They were met there by James McCarter, the new head of BioGenerator, and by the end of the night’s discussions, one fact about these students had come to bother him: Most, he concluded, had never even heard of BioGenerator before taking the course that arranged the visit—and this was a course on entrepreneurship. 

“Nearly half of our investment opportunities are coming out of WashU, yet we are not well known there,” says McCarter. “We’re going to change that.”