Life sciences is a London economic success story. The city has been home to innovative companies and world-leading universities in this sector for decades. As the age of biotech has dawned, there has been an explosion in the number of small companies spinning out and clustering in London, people employed in the sector, and the amount it contributes to the economy.
MedCity, the organisation working to support and promote life sciences in London, can rightly lay claim to some of the credit for this success. MedCity’s roots go back over a decade, a period in which the numbers working in the sector have surged from 20,000 to over 34,000, contributing over £12bn to London’s economy.
Founded by the Mayor of London and recently integrated with the city’s growth agency, London & Partners, MedCity aims to attract investment to the capital, connect partners and champion all the positives London has to offer. “We’re the gateway to life sciences in London,” says MedCity’s Chief Executive, Dr Angela Kukula, “and we were established with a mission to make London the global destination for life sciences.”
Dr Kukula has a varied career history across the science and research sectors. Most recently, she spent a decade at the Institute of Cancer Research in several senior roles followed by a stint in the NHS at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital before taking the reins at MedCity just over a year ago.
What is so special about London that makes it a great place for life sciences? On this, Dr Kukula is clear. London has the essential ingredients: location, people, and ideas – “it’s the one place where you can find everything you need to set up, grow, and thrive as a life sciences company.”
On location, London is ideally placed at the centre of a network of transport connections. “One of the real selling points for London is that you can get just about anywhere really quickly,” says Angela, who points to domestic and international rail connections and that “you’re probably within 40 minutes of an international airport whichever part of London you’re in.”
On people, London is home to 75,000 science and medicine undergraduates and a further 18,400 PhD students – a deep pool to draw on. And with all that London has to offer – culture, history, vibrancy – it’s a magnet to talent and investment from all over the world. With ideas, London is lucky in having three of the top 15 global universities for clinical and health research, more specialist hospitals than anywhere else in Europe, and a track record of nurturing Nobel Prize-winning scientists, behind only Boston and New York.
MedCity’s job is London-wide and has supported the establishment of eight key clusters of innovation across the city: the White City Innovation District, Paddington Life Sciences, the Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter, SC1 London Life Sciences Innovation District (centred around King’s College and Guys and St Thomas’s Hospitals), Canary Wharf, Whitechapel, the Olympic Park and the London Cancer Hub at the Royal Marsden in Sutton. These clusters deliver tremendous value to the knowledge-intensive economy, enabling knowledge exchange, specialised business growth, networking, proximity to talent from top universities and collaboration between anchor institutions, the NHS and scale-ups.
For a fast-growing sector, it has understandably faced growing pains. As set out in LPA’s report on London’s Knowledge Clusters: From emerging to maturing, if London is to fulfil its potential to be the leading global hub for life sciences, urgent action is needed to address funding gaps for university spinouts, ensure that there is a pipeline of the right talent and provide enough incubator facilities to support growth.
The topic of space was the subject of a recent MedCity report, which highlighted a mismatch between demand and supply with just 49% of demand met in Q2 2024. “Our report showed demand getting on for 1m sq ft of space but with a supply pipeline of only a tenth of that,” Dr Kukula says, “on anyone’s measure, that was a massive disconnect.”
Since the report, Dr Kukula has been “really pleased” at how the real estate industry has responded, with “a whole lot of new, really high-tech lab space coming onto the market over the coming five or six years.” If all the buildings with approved planning are constructed, it is predicted that, by 2032, there will be a seven-fold increase in the provision of lab space, resulting in London having the equivalent of 2.5x the space of Oxford and Cambridge’s science parks combined.
The kind of space the industry will need in the coming years is also changing. “At the moment, we’ve got lots of research space being developed, which is great,” says Dr Kukula, “but we also need to work with the property industry on a wider range of demand for life science workspace in the future.”
Manufacturing is one of these areas. “I think that what’s increasingly going to be needed in the future is high-quality manufacturing space,” predicts Dr Kukula. With MedCity supporting London’s development as a premier life sciences destination, “this is the kind of thing that the property industry could really help us with and deliver us the spaces that will help life sciences to manufacture.” Pressed on the kinds of locations where this activity could take place, she points to Old Oak Common and Park Royal – a prime development location promoted by Opportunity London.
The other is around tech and data. “If you take digital health, a real growth sector for the future, it’s not wet lab space that’s needed,” Dr Kukula says, “but access to high-speed data and power networks that can cope with the energy needs of the sector.”
London’s life sciences sector is in competition with other global cities like New York. While public investments flow more freely in the US, London’s capital markets are seeing a steady recovery from the lows of 2022 – 2023, with healthy investment across all stages of funding, and a significant lead on any other European city.
“We’re home to an amazing investment community in the Square Mile, we’re forced to be more creative because the levels of capital flowing still aren’t sufficient to support the critical mass of companies in London, so we still need to raise more, bringing together public money with private and charitable funding, which has created fantastic joint ways of working,” says Dr Kukula, pointing to the Crick Institute in the King’s Cross Knowledge Quarter as a shining example of public money and charitable foundations creating a world-leading centre of excellence with “private money then clustering in around it.”
Looking ahead, there’s much to celebrate given the sector’s success in the last decade, but also more to do to tackle head-on the challenges that come with a fast-growing industry.
