Under the direction of Carlo Yuvienco, the incubator within the Ford Center for Life Science Innovation serves to cultivate a community of high- performing life science start-ups that will define the interface between high-impact biomedical research and early-stage commercialization along New York's Upper East Side biomedical corridor.

During his doctoral and post-doctoral studies, Yuvienco and his colleagues explored strategies to enhance intermolecular interactions between engineered protein constructs and various forms of molecular cargo, including therapeutic small molecules, siRNA, and lipid-based vectors.

These approaches included “supercharging” surface-exposed features of coiled-coil proteins and the incorporation of non-natural fluorinated amino acids into protein sequences to alter supramolecular and bulk self-assembly behavior. Given the potential for applications in drug delivery, specifically the delivery of nucleic acid-based therapeutics and small molecules with low solubility, he and his colleagues collaborated with various members of the NYU Langone Medical School community to prosecute applications in oral cancer, osteoarthritis, and psoriasis. This work has formed the basis for several patents on which he is a co- inventor and has seeded the creation of a STTR-stage start-up, Provizigen.

Following his post-doctoral work, he worked for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a non-profit organization that manages various aspects of New York City’s real estate transactions, asset management, business incentives, and industry development. As a follow-up to the work conducted under NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Yuvienco and the life science team at the NYCEDC led the development and launch of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s LifeSci NYC plan, a $500 million initiative to grow the life sciences industry in NYC.

During the plan’s implementation, he would go on to manage partnerships with the NY Genome Center, the NY Stem Cell Foundation, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, BioLabs@NYU Langone, Harlem Biospace, ARCH Venture Partners, Flagship Pioneering, BioBAT, Eli Lilly, Celgene (Bristol Myers Squibb), and GE Ventures. In addition, he oversaw a variety of support programs for early-stage life science companies, including an entrepreneurship course (ELab NYC), an SBIR coaching course (SBIR Impact NYC), and a city-wide life sciences internship program. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was instrumental to the formation of the city’s partnership with Opentrons’ Pandemic Response Lab, a NYC-based diagnostic laboratory that was created in 4 months to exclusively serve the city hospitals’ demand for 30,000 molecular PCR tests per day.

Following NYCEDC, he joined Envisagenics, a venture-backed drug discovery company based on RNA splicing science from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he led the strategic development and execution of the company's initiatives to broaden access to clinicotranscriptomic datasets and biospecimens via partnerships with academic medical centers, biobanks, and commercial data providers. This work led to data-sharing partnerships with Northwestern University and Cancer Research Horizons.