Reaching the clinic is a major milestone—but it also marks the start of a more complex and capital-intensive phase. Lab needs expand, quality standards tighten, and costs rise fast.

For many biotech startups, the transition to clinical work triggers a wave of infrastructure decisions: upgrading instrumentation, outfitting new lab space, improving environmental controls, and building systems that meet regulatory expectations. These changes often come with steep upfront costs and longer procurement timelines—at a moment when speed, precision, and flexibility matter more than ever.

Let’s explore why clinical-stage biotechs should take a second look at leasing—not as a temporary stopgap, but as a strategic lever to manage burn, support scientific execution, and preserve flexibility as you scale toward pivotal milestones.

Clinical Work Requires a New Level of Infrastructure

From scrappy startup to clinical execution

Early-stage biotech is all about creativity, iteration, and lean execution. At the preclinical stage, it's not unusual to share space in an incubator, split instrumentation with other startups, or stretch a few core pieces of lab equipment across multiple workflows.

But when you enter clinical development, that approach starts to break down.

Suddenly, your experiments need to withstand regulatory scrutiny. Your data must be defensible and repeatable—not just promising. You may need to onboard a quality management system, meet Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) or GxP expectations, and support a broader range of specialized workflows, from QC testing and bioanalysis to clinical sample handling.

This evolution triggers a cascade of infrastructure demands:

• More advanced instrumentation: For example, moving from basic centrifuges to high-speed models, or expanding into automated systems to support throughput and reproducibility.
• Dedicated lab space: Often your current space isn’t enough—whether due to square footage, HVAC limitations, or environmental controls. Clinical programs may require new real estate, HVAC upgrades, or full lab build-outs.
• Tighter validation and documentation requirements: Instruments now need to be validated and consistently calibrated, with full documentation trails for regulatory review.
• Additional lab support systems: Freezers with real-time monitoring, fume hoods with airflow tracking, clean rooms, and backup systems all come into play.

The shift from early-stage experimentation to clinical-grade execution is real—and costly. These aren’t just operational upgrades. They’re critical investments in scientific credibility, regulatory compliance, and successful trial execution.

Clinical-Stage Burn Rates Are No Joke

Capital gets spent faster than you expect

By the time a biotech startup enters the clinic, it’s likely raised a sizable Series A or B round—sometimes exceeding $50M–$100M. On paper, that looks like a healthy cushion. But in reality, clinical-stage companies are managing dozens of competing priorities, and burn accelerates rapidly as programs move forward.

Running a clinical trial means layering new responsibilities on top of an already complex organization. You’re not just running experiments—you’re managing cross-functional execution across R&D, manufacturing, clinical operations, and regulatory. That means more vendors, more oversight, and more infrastructure to support it all.

Some of the biggest cost drivers at this stage include:

• Lab build-outs and real estate upgrades: Clinical-stage biotechs often outgrow shared incubators or leased office-lab hybrids. Moving into larger, purpose-built space introduces a new wave of spending: HVAC installations, power upgrades, clean room retrofits, fume hoods, and validated environmental controls. These build-outs can easily exceed $300–$500 per square foot depending on region and regulatory needs.
• Specialized instrumentation: Clinical workflows often require equipment with tighter tolerances and validated performance. These may include high-capacity freezers with temperature monitoring, analytical systems like LC-MS/MS, HPLCs with audit trails, or automated systems for sample prep and data capture. Each piece of equipment can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars—and that’s before factoring in validation and service contracts.
• Redundancy and risk mitigation: Clinical trials don’t stop for instrument downtime. Teams need backup systems to ensure workflow continuity. That might mean leasing a second centrifuge or freezer, running duplicate systems in parallel, or maintaining extra instrumentation across multiple lab spaces.
• Operational complexity: As your throughput increases, so do recurring costs. Reagents, consumables, maintenance, calibrations, training, LIMS integration, and service agreements all contribute to ongoing opex. For many companies, monthly operational costs balloon in the post-IND phase—even before sites are activated or patients are dosed.

And underneath all of this is the constant pressure to hit timelines. A delayed validation run, a missing data point, or an instrument bottleneck can push back a milestone and impact everything from valuation to the next fundraising round.

That’s why managing infrastructure spend becomes more strategic than ever. Teams need to make confident decisions about what to own, what to lease, and how to preserve optionality without under-equipping the lab. Equipment leasing offers a way to reduce upfront costs and protect runway—without slowing down the science.

But leasing doesn’t just reduce spend—it can also help you build smarter, faster, and with more flexibility at every step of clinical execution.

Lease to Build Smarter, Not Bigger

Equip what you need—when you need it

In early R&D, it's common to make do with minimal setups. But clinical-stage execution demands more: more instrumentation, more redundancy, more compliance-ready workflows. Still, that doesn't mean you have to build out your entire lab footprint all at once.

Leasing lets you scale your infrastructure with precision, aligning equipment decisions with actual program needs—not with overly cautious worst-case assumptions.

Here’s how leasing helps clinical-stage biotechs build smarter:

• Phased lab expansion: Instead of fully equipping every bench on day one, you can bring in specialized equipment—centrifuges, freezers, fume hoods, QC tools—as needed, and expand as your studies progress or new programs spin up.
• Workflow-specific instrumentation: Lease instruments based on exact requirements for clinical assays, sample processing, or validation runs. For example, if one program requires next-gen sequencing or chromatography for bioanalysis, you can lease that equipment for the duration of the study, then re-evaluate.
• Reduce long-term real estate costs: By avoiding overbuilds, you limit wasted square footage and unused lab space. In biotech hubs where commercial real estate is expensive and high-quality lab space is scarce, this can significantly reduce overhead.
• Future-proof your lab: Leasing helps avoid being stuck with obsolete or underutilized instruments as your clinical focus evolves. Instead of guessing which high-cost equipment might be relevant two years from now, you can make targeted, high-confidence decisions based on current timelines and workflows.

Clinical-stage programs often require multiple rounds of lab reconfiguration as programs advance or new therapeutic areas are explored. Leasing keeps those changes nimble and cost-effective. It ensures you’re paying for what you’re using—not for what you hope you’ll need later.

And when you can equip your lab with exactly what you need, exactly when you need it, you’re not just saving money—you’re moving faster and staying focused on the milestones that matter.