Accelerator Corp., the Seattle biotechnology incubator, is taking a new investor into its syndicate, one that could help it cut developments costs and stretch its resources.

The new investor is Pharmaceutical Product Development Inc. (PPD), one of the world’s largest contract research organizations. PPD’s investment will give Accelerator a bigger kitty to seed startup companies. But beyond that, the Wilmington, N.C.-based company, which conducts clinical trials for drug and medical device firms around the world, can draw on its vast resources to help Accelerator assess early-stage biotech concepts and their potential path to market.

With the economy in turmoil and the biotech sector as a whole taking big hits, that kind of arrangement could help Accelerator stretch its resources and weed out technologies that won’t fly in the clinic.

“Clinical work is so incredibly expensive, and if you make the wrong choices, it can be an incredible setback,” said David Schubert, Accelerator’s chief business officer. PPD can help Accelerator “make the right choices in the very complicated world of clinical trials and the FDA and trying to limit surprises,” he added.

Accelerator Corp., founded in 2003, is a syndicate of investors that forms early-stage biotech companies and provides them with office space, management and scientific guidance in exchange for an equity stake. The goal is for startups to eventually attract outside investors and “graduate” from the Accelerator campus in Seattle’s South Lake Union.

Accelerator didn’t specify the size of PPD’s investment, but it appears to be in the range of $4.5 million. The fund, with PPD’s investment, now stands at $27 million; when the fund was first announced in August 2007, it totaled $22.5 million.

PPD joins Accelerator’s existing investor group of Amgen Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, WRF Capital, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. The incubator is affiliated with the Institute for Systems Biology, the Seattle nonprofit research center headed by genomics pioneer Leroy Hood.

Publicly traded PPD Inc., with 10,000 staff and offices in 33 countries, has a market capitalization of nearly $3 billion and ranks among the biggest contract research organizations in the world.