Johnson & Johnson Thursday unveiled a string of new equity investments and research collaborations formed by its network of new innovation centers to advance early stage therapeutic, medical device, diagnostic and consumer health programs. The line-up showcases the work of Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC just as the industry's next crop of small innovators prepares to meet up with potential partners at the BIO International Convention in San Diego next week.

The 12 deals and alliances span a broad range of applications. Included among them are the company's participation in six biopharma investments, including a $23.5 million series A investment in Navitor Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Aduro Biotech Inc.'s June $55 million series C round; a $12.9 million series A investment in Rodin Therapeutics Inc. that J&J co-led with Atlas Venture in May; two additional series A investments with Atlas in Padlock Therapeutics Inc. and Ascelegen Therapeutics Inc.; and the company's partnership with Minerva Neurosciences Inc.

The early stage collaborations, facilitated through J&J's relatively new global innovation centers, includes technologies for employing 3D printing for orthopedic trauma, creating new brown fat for metabolic diseases and developing new approaches to the treatment of lymphoma, rheumatoid arthritis, prostate cancer, dementia, Alzheimer's, diabetes and insomnia.

"These alliances represent our effort to get right in front of where innovation is happening today," Ken Drazan, head of J&J's innovation center in California, told BioWorld Today.

Drazan, a co-founder and partner emeritus at Bertram Capital Management, joined J&J in March. He said the company is passionate about building the innovation ecosystem, "which is undergoing a failure right now" as early stage companies want for venture capital and face complex regulatory hurdles. The innovation centers reflect not only a way to consolidate the multiple call points entrepreneurs have often found when seeking to work with J&J, but also the company's ongoing attempt to reinvent the R&D system and to help ensure that important products to make it through the pipeline.

To date, Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC has consummated roughly 60 deals facilitated through its innovation centers, located in Menlo Park, Calif., Cambridge, Mass., London and Shanghai, the newest location and one that is just getting off the ground with a small but growing scientific team. The company also has been active in supporting a number of incubators, such as a new space in Rehovot, Israel, that it's backing with the Office of the Chief Scientist in Israel, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. and OrbiMed Israel Partners and the Cambridge, Mass.-based Labcentral.

Navitor, one of the companies J&J financed and showcased Thursday, works out of Labcentral. It's four-person team is leveraging the importance of the mTORC1 pathway to develop new therapies for metabolic diseases such as diabetes, as well as targeting applications in autoimmune, musculoskeletal and other disease areas. It is advancing the work of scientific founder David Sabatini, a professor of biology at MIT who has been a leader in defining the complexity of the mTOR pathway.

The company was founded in 2010 with a seed round from Polaris Partners, Atlas and J&J to explore a variety of technologies, then coalesced around work coming out of Sabatini's lab in mid-to-late 2013, Navitor CEO George Vlasuk told BioWorld Today.

"Because mTORC1 is an evolutionarily conserved central pathway in the way a cell reacts to its environment, it plays a vital role in broad series of diseases," Vlasuk said. "I think a lot of pharmaceutical companies realize the power of and opportunity around the mTOR pathway but have not tried to selectively target the pathway in the way we have."

J&J also highlighted a number of other alliances Thursday. Janssen Biotech Inc. and J&J Innovation formed a research collaboration with Weill Cornell Medical College to develop compounds for targeting the function of a lymphoma-causing protein. The company is participating in the U.K. Dementias Research Platform through an agreement facilitated by J&J Innovation and the neuroscience therapeutic area of Janssen Research & Development LLC. Another collaboration with scientists from the University of Manchester will explore the microbiome's impact on health and disease.

Though Drazan declined to disclose how much of J&J's sizable research budget – $8.2 billion worldwide in 2013 – is dedicated to the innovation centers, he cited Assembly Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s plans to go public soon as proof the program is having a positive impact. That company grew and moved ahead in the University of California and J&J-supported incubator QB3. "We're delighted by that. It's an example of where we think we enabled something in the ecosystem. It's not quite ready for us to partner with. But they're moving their business forward, and that's a good thing."