Three no-brainers for investing in high-tech leg-ups for biotech start-ups

Opening a new co-working lab is not an honour I get every day, yet the demand from small science and biotech is such that it feels like it should be. Today’s opening at Alderley Park highlights the needs of the start-up community and how partners such as GE Healthcare Life Sciences can help.

Advanced tech demands new skills

Access to cutting edge technologies that advance research in open access labs is not enough. With advanced new technology comes the need to help nurture expertise through training and development, whether in protein and cell analysis technologies such as those at the Alderley Park lab, or in biopharmaceutical manufacturing such as our educational programming partnership with NIBRT .

Innovation with collaboration drives future technology

More than ever we are seeing the fruits of open innovation through collaboration at facilities such as Alderley Park. These hotbeds of science transcend organisational boundaries and encourage companies large and small to learn from and with each other, and build on each others’ advances. Without our open access lab at the Stevenage BioScience Catalyst, for example, we may not have had the opportunity to welcome the Puridify team, acquiring the company, investing in new manufacturing capacity and developing the future of fibre-based purification in biopharmaceuticals.

Investing in UK science accelerates access to new therapies

UK biotech is growing rapidly and its impact resonates globally. With almost 6,000 life science companies and a quarter of a million employed in the sector, the UK punches above its weight in life sciences R&D, but we cannot take this for granted. It requires sustained investment and collaboration across industry, academia and the public sector. Government has a key role to play, increasing public R&D investment, incentivising private R&D investment and investing in people and skills. Our partnership with Cobra Biologics and the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), funded by an Innovate UK grant is a good example of this kind of thinking. It has developed a scalable, cost-effective purification process for adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) that will remove a significant bottleneck in the development of gene therapies.

A word about why...another no-brainer

Being firmly connected to, embedded in and supportive of science innovation in biotech campuses makes good business sense for us, and we do good business by doing good. We learn from the start-ups whom we support at facilities such as Alderley Park, we provide access to early expertise and technology that boosts to our customers and installed base in emerging biotech, and we get valuable insight into both their needs as well as gaining insight into technology and science trends. It just makes sense.

Read more about our new lab at Alderley Park on BioPharma Reporter here >>