For many people, the answer might simply be ‘good health’ or something that removes the threat of serious illness such as ‘find a cure for cancer’.
Thanks to advances in modern medicine, we are living longer than ever before, but we are also more demanding of our healthcare providers and have a greater understanding of the medical conditions that can determine our quality of life.
It follows that Life Science is truly an industry that affects us all. It did not require a global pandemic to illustrate the importance of drug discovery and diagnostics, any more than we needed Covid to underline the valuable role the NHS and healthcare providers in other countries have in protecting all that we hold dear.
Yet we are emerging from a health crisis that has pushed biosecurity up the agenda, made pandemic preparedness a priority and driven massive interest in biotech.
The UK has long been blessed with a powerful base of science and research in Life Sciences and pharmaceuticals.
We are exploring life science from the perspective of the built environment. In this first instance, we brought together a group of industry professionals in Cambridge to discuss ‘space’ and ‘place’...
Colin Brown, Development Director, Mission Street | John Steele, Project Director, Hoare Lea | Galvin Tarling, Global Head of Life Science and Director, Gleeds | Emily Slupek, Partner, Bidwells | Jon Flin, Director, CB3 Consulting | Jamie Shearman, Area Director, Morgan Sindall Construction, Cambridge | Matt Dunkley, Head of Design, Morgan Sindall Construction Cambridge | David Rowsell, Area Director, Morgan Sindall Construction, Northern Home Counties | Brian Brooks, Head of Design, Morgan Sindall Construction Northern Home Counties | (Chair) Chris Hulme, Director, Influential
What is the contribution real estate and construction is making to ensure great science continues to flourish?
How can placemaking help foster an environment where translating research into drug discovery and development has the best chance of producing better patient outcomes?
When will we reach a tipping point where the parallel demand for decarbonising how we live and work makes a real impact in life science?
As part of UK’s largest life science cluster – spanning London, Cambridge and Oxford – it generates billions every year for the UK exchequer and provides over 24,000 highly skilled jobs.
A study prepared by the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership in 2020 found that the region between Oxford and Cambridge contributed £111bn in gross value added to the economy every year.
The government has forecast that could rise to between £191bn and £274bn a year if a build programme delivered new homes and linked up towns by rail and motorway.
Casting the net a little wider, the celebrated Golden Triangle features four of the ten best universities in the world for health care: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and University College London, according to the Times Higher Education supplement.
Cambridge Biomedical Campus alone is the largest centre of medical research and health science in Europe.
It is the site of AstraZeneca’s new global headquarters, while the Wellcome Sanger Institute, home to the bulk of Britain’s genomic-sequencing capacity, is only 13km farther south.
This intellectual powerhouse is not without challenges, especially in respect of the dearth of lab space, transport connectivity and the affordability of housing, along with the ever-present challenge of driving towards Net Zero. But we started our debate by focusing on what space Cambridge needs now.
