This network of nerds and nous is yielding results. According to the BioIndustry Association, a trade body, British life-sciences firms raised £4.5bn in 2021, compared with just £261m in 2012. It was not always thus. Andrew Williamson, the boss of Cambridge Innovation Capital, a venture-capital fund, says Cambridge was an “academic ivory-tower town” 25 years ago.
Another factor also pushes promising British life-science firms abroad: investors. Life-sciences companies are capital-intensive: it takes a lot of cash to build laboratories and run expensive clinical trials. They also tend to grow slowly, as their products are complex and highly regulated. The relatively small pools of capital available through Britain-based investors are simply insufficient for the winding path to viability.
A firm called Artios, on the other side of the Babraham campus, has a similar story. It specialises in a technology calledDamage Response, creating compounds that inhibit processes which let cancers spread. Niall Martin, its boss, says that the $153m he raised from American investors last year comes with a plan to float the firm on the Nasdaq stockmarket in New York in a few years’ time.
Finding a place to work is one part of the puzzle. Improving the connections between the various bits of the golden triangle, and opening up affordable new places for life-sciences employees to live, are others.
By recycling people through different firms, “fast failure” also helps to ease the talent shortage that afflicts expanding life-sciences firms in Britain. Some of this shortage relates to specific skills. Lab technicians and biological scientists have been labelled “shortage occupations”: the government has dropped the minimum salary requirement for visa applications for people in these jobs. But some of it is about characteristics.
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