Lab Space for Rent in San Diego

Size

300–25,137 sq ft

Price

From $1,820/bench/mo

Biosafety

BSL-2

Availability

Available

Aquillius is a privately run life-science and medtech innovation hub in San Diego's Rancho Bernardo area, with 25,000+ sq ft of purpose-built lab and office space under one roof. It is unusual among shared-lab providers in combining wet labs and BSL-2 cleanrooms with an on-site vivarium, analytical chemistry suites, and an ESD-safe tech/prototyping lab (3D printers, CNC, SolidWorks workstations) — so device and therapeutics startups can go from bench work to preclinical studies to prototype in the same building. Companies can scale from a single lab bench up to a private lab suite (roughly 300 sq ft to the full 25,137 sq ft floor), alongside incubator programming, mentor/investor networking, and funding guidance.

Size

Up to 37,000 sq ft

Price

From $2,200/bench/mo

Biosafety

BSL-1, BSL-2

Availability

Available

BioLabs is the largest international membership network of shared, fully-equipped co-working lab and office facilities, with 20+ sites embedded in major innovation clusters — often co-located with anchor institutions such as Tufts, Yale West Campus, NYU Langone, UVM, TUM Munich, and Pegasus Park in Dallas. Members can start with a single bench and scale into private BSL-2 lab suites and offices with no long-term lease, and get concierge lab operations, shared core equipment, and heavy sponsor engagement (Thermo Fisher, Agilent, Sigma-Aldrich) including "Golden Ticket" pharma-sponsored free bench programs. It has hosted 500+ life science companies whose members have raised over $5B, making it the default landing pad for venture-track biotech founders who want instant credibility and pharma access alongside space.

Size

Up to 40,000 sq ft

Price

From $1,000

Biosafety

Not published

Availability

Limited

JLABS is Johnson & Johnson's global life-science incubator network, offering wet lab benches, private lab suites and offices on a genuinely "no-strings-attached" basis — J&J takes no equity, claims no IP rights, and does not require confidential information to apply. Residents get capital-light access to shared instrumentation, EH&S and operations management, plus J&J scientific mentorship, investor/partnering days and QuickFire Challenge funding. Important caveat for 2026: JLABS has sharply contracted, closing Houston, Washington D.C. and Toronto and handing its NYC site to the New York Genome Center, leaving San Diego, South San Francisco and Boston (via LabCentral) as the only remaining North American physical sites.

Size

Not published

Price

$1,800–$4,500/bench/mo

Biosafety

Not published

Availability

Limited

Prodigy Labs (formerly Prodigy Scientific) runs a ~4,000 sq ft incubator on its Oberlin Drive campus in Sorrento Valley, offering month-to-month bench leases with no long-term commitment alongside shared mass spectrometry, cell culture and molecular biology instrumentation. What sets it apart is the bundling of physical bench space with an in-house analytical testing lab (ISO 17025 accreditation pending) — members get priority queue access with sub-3-day turnaround on standard panels — plus a proprietary "Laboratory OS" (Part 11-ready ELN, FEFO inventory, sample tracking, procurement) included from day one. Space is currently application-gated to a limited founding cohort, with instrument support via partner Innovative Lab Services.

Size

Not published

Price

On request

Biosafety

Not published

Availability

Available

Alexandria LaunchLabs is the incubator platform of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, offering research-ready, fully furnished private and shared lab and office space to seed- and early-stage life science companies of roughly 1–35 people across six US clusters: New York City, Cambridge, Seattle, San Diego, the SF Bay Area (Stanford Research Park) and Research Triangle. What sets it apart from a typical incubator is that space sits inside Alexandria's Megacampus ecosystems and comes bundled with roughly 30 pieces of shared core equipment, curated programming and mentorship, plus direct access to startup capital through Alexandria Venture Investments and the Alexandria Seed Capital Platform. The NYC facility was the first laboratory space in the world to achieve a WELL Health-Safety Rating.

Size

Not published

Price

On request

Biosafety

BSL-1, BSL-2

Availability

Ask provider

BioBurst.io is a founder-run biotech incubator in downtown Waltham, MA (note: not San Diego, as previously recorded) offering a permitted, fully maintained BSL-2 facility with individual benches in a shared lab or private lab suites. It was started by scientist-entrepreneurs Khanh Huynh, Ph.D. and Magali Soumillon, Ph.D. to give technical founders a friction-free, turnkey workspace with equipment maintenance, training, EHS, and waste handling included. Its main differentiator is bundled in-house CRO capability — antibody discovery, protein engineering, custom NGS (Illumina and Oxford Nanopore), and bioinformatics pipeline development — available as add-on services alongside the bench rental.

Size

15,000–36,000 sq ft

Price

On request

Biosafety

Not published

Availability

Available

GENESIS – San Diego is a 200,000+ RSF, eight-story Class A LEED Gold life science building at 1155 Island Avenue — the first purpose-built lab building in downtown San Diego, developed by Phase 3 Real Estate Partners with Bain Capital Real Estate and Barings. It offers move-in-ready pre-designed lab/office spec suites on ~25,000 SF floor plates, delivered with modular benching, service units for multiple lab gases and electrical circuits, and 4–8 ft fume hoods, so teams can occupy quickly rather than build out. Note this is a direct-lease landlord product (suite- and floor-scale, brokered through JLL and Newmark), not a bench-by-bench incubator — best suited to funded companies needing 15,000 SF or more, though its downtown location, Blue Line trolley access at the door, and 8th-floor penthouse conference center make it a differentiated alternative to Torrey Pines and Sorrento Valley.

Size

Not published

Price

On request

Biosafety

Not published

Availability

Limited

Lilly Gateway Labs San Diego is Eli Lilly's pharma-backed residency incubator, opened September 2025 on Alexandria Real Estate's One Alexandria Square Megacampus in Torrey Pines. The 82,514 sq ft site is divided into 18 lab modules with paired private office and lab space for up to 15 early-stage life sciences companies and 250+ staff. What sets it apart from a standard incubator is the Catalyze360 support layer: residents pay rent for turnkey wet lab space but also get scientific and development advice from senior Lilly therapeutic-area experts, pitch coaching, and access to Lilly's investor network — with no obligation to license to or take investment from Lilly.

Size

Not published

Price

On request

Biosafety

Not published

Availability

Available

Scintillon Institute is a non-profit biomedical research institute in San Diego's Sorrento Valley that runs SI-START, a life-science incubator embedded inside a working research campus of ~19 faculty labs across three Nancy Ridge Drive buildings. What sets it apart is the granularity and adjacency: you can start with a single "knee-hole" (half bench) and a hot desk and scale to multiple benches plus office space, while sharing capital equipment and core facilities — an OLAW-certified vivarium with surgical suite and rodent behavioral core, a Flow Cytometry Core, and the Scintillon Imaging Center (confocal, epifluorescence, high-content and cryo-EM). Residents also get SBIR/STTR grant-writing support, VC pitch opportunities, vendor discounts, and lab safety/compliance training from institute staff.