Our scale-up vision is to be the best place in Europe to scale-up a life sciences venture. We want the Babraham Research Campus ecosystem to support and facilitate companies with innovative and breakthrough research to scale rapidly, optimising the potential for the innovation and spearheading R&D in the UK.
Want to know what life as a Scale-up at the Babraham Research Campus is really like? We sat down with some of the leaders of companies that are, or have, scaled-up on Campus to ask them what role it has played in the successful growth of their businesses and the development of their science.
In this short film Steve explains how the Campus has acted as a conduit linking his academic and commercial research and what makes the Campus so special.
Jill tells us about what motivated her to pursue a career in life science and charts the growth of RxCelerate on Campus, from humble beginnings in an incubator lab all the way to own HQ within the Dorothy Hodgkin building.
Kymab, a Sanofi company, is developing novel human antibody-based therapies in a broad range of indications. Its unique platforms generate a vast repertoire of fully-human, species cross-reactive and affinity-matured antibodies against challenging targets.
Founded in 2009 to convert innovative Bicycles into transformative medicines for life-altering diseases, Bicycles proprietary phage display screening platform is based on novel science first conceived in the laboratory of Sir Greg Winter, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for pioneering work in phage display. A transatlantic company, headquartered here on Campus within the vibrant life science cluster of Cambridge, UK, with key oncology functions and members of its leadership team located in the biotech hub of Boston, Mass, USA.
bit.bio’s mission is coding cells for health. Its current focus is to develop a scalable technology platform capable of producing consistent batches of every human cell. This has the potential to unlock a new generation of medicine: it will enable research and drug discovery to move on from inappropriate models and work with the cells that actually are affected by human disease.
We are committed to developing adaptable spaces that are commercially viable for growing life science companies, led by our experts with over 25 years’ experience in lab/office building design.
We have R&D buildings on Campus ranging from 8,000 sq ft to 50,000 sq ft, consisting of bespoke R&D laboratory and office space, which can be tailored to suit both chemistry and molecular biology set ups, while also providing the key collaborative spaces and facilities required for companies wishing to provide their growing workforces with the high quality experience they need to thrive.
Our building designs balance adaptability for the future with a fit-out that’s both attainable and commercially viable. We future-proof our designs without making it overly complicated or overwhelming for occupiers to make the right decisions.
The current success of the Campus is underpinned by a shared focus in the science and innovation themes undertaken by the companies and academic researchers on site. The Campus research community is delivering research and innovation with a focus on key questions in biology that resonate with the Campus’ commercial community, with global investors, and society more widely.
This coherence has enabled breakthrough research and innovation opportunities to be captured, for example in areas such as antibody technologies. Current strengths and synergy between the academic research at the Babraham Institute and commercial development undertaken on the Campus include understanding fundamental and disease biology (with a particular focus on aging, immunology, cell signalling processes, genomics, epigenomics, lipidomics, proteomics), coupled with delivering the capabilities for drug discovery and development (with a particular focus on biologics drug discovery and development, development of AI and its applications in drug discovery, methods for identifying disease mechanism targeting, early clinical development, chemistry, and in vivo sciences).
These strengths and synergies are also supporting the development of thematic alliances as platforms for future breakthrough science, innovation and business models.
Flow Cytometry through the Babraham Institute offers high quality, world class instrumentation to help meet your research goals. Within the facility there are self-use analysers and cell sorters that are run as a service.
Babraham Institute offers a team of experienced bioinformaticians and statisticians all with a biological background. They provide advice and assistance on using computational methods to extract biological information.
The NGS facility is equipped with an Illumina NextSeq, MiSeq and a HiSeq. Having a selection of sequencers allows researchers to select the read length and sequencing depth best suited for their projects.
The Cambridge building, at the heart of the Campus, was specifically designed to enable collaboration and facilitate connection. The restaurant and café seat over 200 people, and offers a high-quality full breakfast and lunch service through our catering partner BaxterStorey; and is an ideal space to meet, grab a coffee, or a bite to eat and share ideas. The first floor of the Cambridge Building holds our two state-of-the-art meeting rooms and The Petersfield Lecture Theatre, which can hold just over 200 people. Many internal lectures and external events are held here throughout the year, from investor conferences and networking functions to lunch and learn seminars.
Explore holding a meeting or event in the Cambridge Building
Whether you are just starting out in business or are taking your company to the next level there are so many people on Campus or Campus alumni who have been there and done it before. The environment and culture has been developed and nurtured over decades to facilitate and celebrate the sharing of ideas. What’s more the talent that has built up on Campus and moves between companies has added to the culture of collaboration – sharing knowledge and experience in pursuit of improving outcomes for all. Steve Jackson, Founder of Mission Therapeutics sums it up beautifully:
“I think there is a very interesting thing on the Babraham Research Campus, which is really, for want of a better term, an ecosystem; and what I mean by an ecosystem is that there are companies at various stages of development, it’s a friendly environment where companies tend to lend advice to each other. The ecosystem also means that certain individuals over time may transition from one company to another, or interact, or collaborate with one another and so, as I walk around the Campus for example, there are many individuals and companies that I have contact with, personal, academic, or business relationships and that all adds to the dynamism on the Campus which I think is fairly unique.”
Andy is an entrepreneur and investor with an established track record in founding and scaling up innovative Biotech and Healthtech companies in the UK. He is currently Chairman of Arecor, Congenica, Abcodia, Closed Loop Medicine and is a Director of Owlstone Medical, Ieso Digital Health, Cancer Research Technology (commercial board of CR-UK) and The Scale Up Institute. He is an advisor to several investment funds including Cambridge Innovation Capital and the UCL Technology Fund and was, until recently, a director of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Andy is a Cambridge Graduate with a PhD in Chemistry and an early career spanning positions with ICI (now AstraZeneca) and PA Technology. He was a founder and executive director of Chiroscience plc until its merger with Celltech in 1999 and since that time he has founded, invested in and helped to scale more than 25 innovative ventures including companies such as Vectura, Arakis, Cambridge Biotechnology Ltd and Geneservice. Andy is also a founding member of the Cambridge Angels. He received a CBE for services to life-science investment in 2015.
Following an academic career at Cambridge University spanning 20 years, leading a world-renowned group investigating the biology of chronic inflammation, David joined Index Ventures as a Venture Partner, before co-founding leading European Venture Capital house Medicxi in 2015. He is now Chief Scientific Advisor to Medicxi, while creating new biotech companies, together with Richard Mason, at the Foundation Institute for 21st Century Medicine, based here at the Babraham Research Campus.
David is also co-Founder Executive Chairman at RxCelerate Group, a rapidly-growing provider of out-sourced drug development services to the pharmaceutical industry, with more than 40 staff also based on Campus. David has more than 70 academic publications in journals including Nature, Science & Nature Medicine, is an inventor on more than one hundred patents, and has founded more than 20 biotech companies, including Funxional Therapeutics (sold to Boehringer Ingelheim in 2012) and XO1 (sold to Janssen in 2015). As DrugBaron, David is also a well-known blogger with Forbes, and writes extensively on drug discovery and development.
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