“We’ve built it, now how do we get them to come?” was the title of the roundtable John McGill chaired at London Lab Live last week, as we sought to promote opportunities in the life sciences sector within the UK Innovation Corridor.
London Lab Live is the UK’s premier annual conference and exhibition for lab industries, bringing together pharma, biotech, academia, and the life sciences real estate and investment community. It takes place at ExCeL London, where attendees come together for two days of programming on the lab of the future. The Innovation Corridor attended, and participated in several sessions across the two-day conference.
Our chair, Jackie Sadek, opened the conference with the keynote panel “Promise, Practicality, and Performance: Navigating sustainable growth across the UK R&D landscape”, alongside ARIA chief executive Kathleen Fisher, King’s Health Partners’ Graham Lord and AstraZeneca’s Andrew Menzies-Gow, moderated by Bloomberg’s Ashleigh Furlong. The conversation quickly turned on questions the corridor was built to answer including how the UK aligns public and private investment, retains R&D talent, and competes globally for scale.
The roundtable that afternoon, which was mentioned above, drove straight to the heart of the corridor’s investment thesis. From the Royal Docks through Harlow and Stevenage to Cambridge and Peterborough, the Innovation Corridor offers what concentrated clusters cannot: lab and incubator space at every price point, planning consents in the pipeline, and the rail and road connectivity to match.
On day two, UKIC Director John McGill chaired the Facilities, Real Estate and Clean Room stream and moderated the panel “Lab-to-Launch: Navigating UK’s Facilities Landscape”, joined by Babraham Research Campus, the Imperial Incubator and the Oxford Trust. The pipeline of space along the corridor means a spinout can grow from a single bench to a fifty-person company without relocating, and the resulting jobs spread across fourteen local authorities rather than a single postcode.
The conference was a great opportunity to promote our corridor ahead of UKREiiF which will take place later this month, and life sciences will continue to be a key sector for us moving forwards.
