BioCity to develop BioHub at Alderley Park post AstraZeneca

BioCity Nottingham, a UK provider of life sciences business incubation services, has been appointed by AstraZeneca (LSE: AZN) to establish a new center for bioscience companies at Alderley Park in Cheshire, which the Anglo-Swedish drug major has revealed it will vacate as part of a restructuring (The Pharma Letter March 19). The BioHub will initially provide 36,000 sq ft of high-end laboratory and office facilities for early-stage and growing firms engaged in innovative drug discovery and development. The aim is to secure a sustainable future for the site.

The BioCity management team has worked with colleagues at AstraZeneca since late 2012 to look into the feasibility of creating a specialist center for the next generation of life science companies. With this agreement in place, BioCity now has a presence in three of the main UK life science “hot-spots having established BioCity Nottingham in 2003 and BioCity Scotland in 2012. The organization has a strong track record of working with global Pharmaceutical partners such as MSD (the UK subsidiary of Merck & Co), and now AstraZeneca, to bring about the transformation of highly-valuable sites and facilities. There is strong evidence to indicate that the clustering of life science businesses that BioCity engineers provides huge benefits to the companies and leads to greater success as well as opening up significant investment opportunities and adding value to the regional economy, the company says.

Blueberry, Imagen and Redx first tenants