UK Biotech Gets a Big Boost from GSK
The UK government is throwing its weight behind biosciences (again) by creating a £37m bioscience campus in Hertfordshire, this time with the considerable weight of pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline behind it. The Stevenage science park is also receiving funding from the East of England Development Agency, the Wellcome Trust and the Technology Strategy Board.
The focus will be on drug development, with start-up residents sharing space with GSK's R&D facilities and practising 'open innovation'.
GSK has donated £10.9m to the site, just slightly less than the UK Strategic Investment Fund, which put in £11.7m, and expects resident start-ups to "tap into GSK's management and expertise in drug discovery while remaining independent".
The region's already well known for biotech pioneers such as Celltech and CAT, many radiating out from the original UK cluster of Cambridge University spin-outs. Business secretary Peter Mandelson hopes to encourage similar start-ups in the Stevenage site, which the government believes could create 1,500 highly skilled jobs for sci-tech graduates.
Its aim -- to create a "world-leading hub for early-stage biotech companies" interested in collaboration and open innovation -- will sound familiar to anyone who remembers early New Labour attempts to seed business clusters by backing 'incubation' units.
In its early days, New Labour's then-Chancellor, Gordon Brown, returned from visits to successful US industry hubs such as Silicon Valley, inspired and determined to create similar high-tech/biotech clusters in the UK.
Biotech is often touted as one of the UK's most promising industries. But investors and the public seem to wax and wane, with the length of drug development trials and the cost of R&D making bioscience start-ups costly, if ultimately lucrative, to back.
Politically, it seemed to fall out of favour in the early 2000s. Dolly the Cloned Sheep was hailed as the start of a revolution in biotech and life sciences. But over a decade later, progress on cloning has been slow and PPL, the firm spun out to capitalise on the Roslin Institute's results, has gone bust. Monsanto, with its genetically modified crops, became inextricably linked with the anti-globalisation movement. And one of the UK's most famous biotech pioneers, Sir Chris Evans, found himself in the limelight for all the wrong reasons a few years ago.
The resurgence in interest in bioscience can be no bad thing, and the job and business creation the Stevenage site promises has to be encouraging. One question (and another, implicit, around one backer's independence): why didn't the UKSIF put more money into BioCity, the already existing Nottingham bioscience incubator?