Andy Williams, chair of the Oxford-Cambridge Supercluster Board, led a discussion on translating, scaling and manufacturing in the life sciences sector as part of UKSPA’s 40th anniversary conference at Warwick University.
He said: “We do have great science and we’re translating that science better than we were and we’ll get even better.
“But the rubber hits the road really, when you start trying to put that into places. And that’s why I think that is what UKSPA is all about: the science parks where these things start.”
Orestis Tzortzoglou, vice president for development at BioMed Realty, a leading life science and technology property company, said: “I think the challenge from a realistic perspective is how we provide the right solutions for companies at different stages of their work to enable them to continue their journey.
“Historically it’s been more of an organic take up on all the real estate; companies find space and they make it work. In the last 10 years we’ve seen a number of institutional investors coming into the market and providing bespoke solutions.
“The service part is also very important, especially if you’re a company on the front end, a start-up or scale-up. It’s not just the bricks and mortar, it’s everything else that goes with it.
“If you have a small workforce, having the ability to make a phone call to an engineer on the campus to fix something immediately, rather than having to wait for a week for them to arrive from another place, those little things make a huge difference on that journey.
“Also, facilities being bespoke to provide the right level of infrastructure to enable that research to accelerate. Small margins make big differences so being bespoke is particularly important.”
Looking at the trends, he said: “There has been less on the chemistry front in recent years in terms of the infrastructure that is being provided, more on the biology front, more in the computational science, and the buildings are getting more data hungry.
“So you have to provide more infrastructure on that side as well. What we’re also seeing is the flexibility side. Because of the pace at which science is evolving tenants are looking for the opportunity to be able to make adaptations to the space within short periods of time.
“Having this sort of relationship with the landlord and being able to make changes at short notice is important to them.
“We have certainly seen a shift in the operation of real estate; what we end up building requires a slightly different setup to what it was even five years ago. That constantly changes.”
Turning to Peter Ward, director of real estate development at King’s College London NHS Trust, Andy Williams said: “We’ve struggled with realising the value of the jewel in the crown, which everyone sees as the NHS and its single point of delivery. So how how are you seeing things from your perspective?”
Peter Ward said: “King’s is the biggest healthcare educator in Europe. If it’s simply a numbers game, then a number of those people are going to have a clever idea. We think that a subsectorally-focused cluster approach is the right one and that’s what we’ve been looking at in South London.
“St Thomas has tended to have a focus on biomedical engineering and healthcare technology because we’ve got the children’s hospital there and the kids grow. You have to replace their prosthetics and their implants and that stuff is 3D printed these days.
“The A&E is all about rapid diagnostics, so we had London’s first seven total MRI, and cardiovascular, which is all about stents and surgery.
“Guy’s is all about drug discoveries – cancer and autoimmune diseases. Denmark Hill, is about the connection between mind and body, mental healthcare and neurosciences.
“We should be celebrating particular types of specialist understanding of life science, discovery and how that might be applied. You’ve got a great university, a very large teaching hospital trust.
“But where we struggle is that they’re very bleak places to be for the finance directors of those institutions. They are systematically looking at ‘how do I make my NHS service, which is basically governed from above, into the best soup even though I’ve got all these fantastic ingredients?’”
On top of financial restrictions, he said, “Basic science research, when it’s government funded, gets you 80p in the pound. How do you turn that into the entrepreneurial Nirvana that we’re all talking about?
“From a real estate perspective, that means we’re operating out of pretty awful buildings. Trying to persuade people to come along and invest in your infrastructure when you’re not allowed to sign a lease is really difficult. We are directed down a very rigid-feeling cultural approach to investment in NHS buildings and space in which we can collaborate.
“There is a culture in the NHS and the university sector so if you have a project you chop it in half and you keep chopping it in half until it’s small enough for nobody to really care, and so you end up with these relatively small investments using government funding. And I think that that misses the scale of the opportunity which we’re potentially on the on the edge of.
He continued: “The university has become the biggest public sector manufacturer of viral vectors in Europe, incrementally doing one lab here, one lab there, at £1m apiece.
“We just ended up salami slicing our way and as a consequence have a very higgledy piggledy estate. If we were able to, we would like to realise some of the productivity potential, which is a big dancy thing for the health service.
“By moving some of that stuff into a neighbouring building, we would need the neighbouring building developer to accept that we’re not allowed to sign a 40-year lease, index linked, because it ends up on our balance sheet and then we’re told it’s going to come out of our allowance for capital, which frankly is keeping the lights on and paying for medical equipment.
“We’re not asking for huge amounts of money from government. We’re asking for the freedom to innovate around how we deliver real estate that supports an agenda which is nationally significant.”
Stephen Ward, chief manufacturing officer at the Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult, led the design, build and GMP licensing of the innovative £75m CGT Catapult facility in Stevenage, home to a 7,700 sqm facility for clinical and commercial manufacturing of advanced therapy medicinal products.
“I’ve been doing this pretty much the last 25 years. So I’ve got lots of scars and bruises from trying to scale and manufacture. Basically, I have to build infrastructure to allow us to deploy technology platforms in the UK.”
Starting at Guy’s Hospital, where the Catapult still has its R&D lab, it automated processes in cell and gene therapies, taking stem cells and genetically engineering them. 12 years on it has seen tremendous success in treating blood cancers and is now moving on to solid cancers and, said Mr Ward, the aim was to use CGT for autoimmune diseases.
“They (CGT) are really transformative. There are all sorts of ways we can use this gene therapy and gene modification in treating rare disease. You are potentially curing patients and the macro health and economic impact of this is huge.
“One of the barriers that we have at the moment is being asked how we can justify £2m up front for gene therapy? Well, look at the health and economic outcomes – you are probably taking out £10m-£15m of treatment over a lifetime. But it’s an amortised model and the NHS is set up to manage budgets on a yearly basis.
“Where does manufacturing come into this? Well, monoclonal antibodies were developed in the UK. It’s now a £250 billion global industry, £300 billion by 2030. We’ve got five CDMOs in the UK (contract development and manufacturing organisations), which are pretty small scale in a global context.
“So the economic value we’re retaining in the UK is tiny. We’re trying to help patients but also there’s the economic value of transforming economies, people’s lives, not just patients’ lives. And that’s the opportunity we’ve got with cell & gene, that’s what we’re trying to do at the Catapult.
“We were developing these processes, and I was transferring them to contract manufacturers in Europe. So we got about £100 million and selected Stevenage; it was a good location, in the middle of the Golden Triangle but also great logistics – these cells have got to be moved around the place globally.
“We’ve now got a cluster which is globally recognised as one of the biggest outside of the US. It was pretty much based on £100m investment around manufacturing innovation. We have come up with a new centre design. It’s basically a GMP incubator that you could argue is the first one globally. It’s been copied and now they’ve got one in Holland and want to put several in the US and elsewhere. So it’s not the global export that we’ve got, it’s not really helping us from a global FDI perspective.
“That’s why manufacturing is important. This stuff is difficult. It’s not a case of just outsourcing to China and it comes back as an API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) or whatever. The R&D manufacturing is still pretty intense. There’s a big opportunity here for the UK.
“With early manufacturing footprints it’s important to embed the supply chains, get the right skills going.
“It was all working wonderfully until about four or five years ago, and then something happened and it’s been a bit more difficult to get people to come to the UK, to get cells in and out of Europe with all the barriers, etcetera, but we’ve got to keep pushing this USP.
“We’re investing a lot in next generation technology. We have the world’s first cell robotic system that has been developed in Cambridge. We’re installing it in the centre for new digital automation test beds to try to hyperscale these therapies.
“About half a million people globally are eligible for these products. They’re roughly £250,000-£300,000 a pop. 10,000 patients are getting it globally. That’s dreadful.
“These are Big Pharma players here. It’s because the processing is really bad and that’s holding the investment back. So how do we break those barriers on automation and how do we leverage up the tech element to show the UK is a great place to get these next generation manufacturing technologies embedded and then supply from here?
“It will be a distributed model. People will be doing stuff in the UK and they will be doing stuff elsewhere. But we need some manufacturing footprint to remain in the UK so we keep some of that added value.”
Author: Simon Penfold
Photography: Ed Nix
