Prince Charles Opens £1bn Life Science Centre

Life science research and development (R&D) in the UK has been given a significant boost after Prince Charles opened a new £1 billion facility.

His Royal Highness unveiled The Discovery Centre (DISC) in Cambridge earlier this week (November 23rd), which is the latest R&D building in the country.

AstraZeneca is behind the huge centre, which will accommodate 2,200 research scientists when in full operation, and include artificial-intelligence driven technology, advanced robotics, and high-throughput screening.

Pascal Soriot, chief executive officer at AstraZeneca, said the facility has been created to “drive the next wave of scientific innovation”.

“Our new Discovery Centre in Cambridge raises the bar for sustainable R&D and global collaboration across our industry. It will allow us to break new boundaries in the understanding of disease biology, bring life-changing medicines to patients and power the next stage of our company’s growth,” Mr Soriot stated.

DISC will contribute to AstraZeneca’s goal to discover and develop next generation therapeutics – such as nucleotide-based, gene-editing and cell therapies – and specialise in precision medicines.

This is one of three AstraZeneca R&D centres, with one in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in the US, and another in Gothenburg in Sweden. Thanks to its integrated teams and fast decision-making, it has created one of the most productive life sciences pipelines.

As a result of this, more than 1,000 manuscripts were published last year, including 138 high impact peer-review journals – a significant increase from the one produced in 2010.

It has clearly invested heavily in its life science sector over the last decade, spending more than $7 billion (£5.25 billion) a year in R&D.

AstraZeneca hopes the new facility, which is located within the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, will increase its leading levels of productivity even further.

Cambridge was a strategic choice for the centre, as the life science cluster in the city is the most productive in Europe. There are over 400 businesses and 20,000 employees working in the sector there, and it has produced more patents than anywhere else in the UK.

Prince Charles was given a tour of the new facility by the chief executive and chairman Leif Johansson, as well as other senior leaders.

The building itself has been designed with 174 boreholes for natural geothermal energy, four ‘hybrid cooling towers’, and a ground source heat pump. These have been added to reduce its output, saving enough energy to provide power to 2,500 homes.

AstraZeneca’s new building meets the world’s highest environmental standards, and has a ‘saw tooth’ roof design, providing as much natural daylight as possible, thereby reducing the need for electricity.

This will help the bio-pharmaceutical company meet its Ambition Zero Carbon program to produce zero carbon emissions from its operations by 2025 and to be carbon negative just five years later.

AstraZeneca hit the headlines last week, revealing it has supplied two billion doses of its Covid-19 vaccines in less than a year.

More than 170 countries across the world have received the inoculation, which was created by AstraZeneca in collaboration with Oxford University, and 175 million doses have been given to lower- and lower-middle-income nations.

Mr Soriot stated the jab has resulted in: “Our vaccine has played a key role in tackling the biggest public health emergency of our lifetime: an estimated million lives saved, 50 million infections prevented, two billion doses delivered.”

To find out more about science sales pipeline, give us a call today.