It was the biggest science and technology deal of its kind in Europe last year. A £360m 50:50 partnership between Bruntwood and Legal and General, designed to drive business growth in our northern cities and create over 20,000 new high value jobs in the growing life sciences and technology sector.

The announcement and the formation of a new specialist company to drive it, Bruntwood SciTech, came in October 2018. So now for the proof of the pudding ... delivery.

In addition to creating jobs Bruntwood SciTech is looking to treble its current customer base of businesses in life sciences and tech from 500 to 1,500 over the next five years. The new company is also committed to delivering on the Life Sciences Deal within the Government’s Industrial Strategy, published at the end of 2017.

The ambitious business plan would see Bruntwood SciTech’s assets grow from 1.6million sq ft on day one to over 6.2million sq ft over the next ten years, increasing the value of the portfolio from £340m to over £2bn. It is doing this by working in partnership, bringing together public, private and academic institutions to unlock urban renewal opportunities and accelerate growth of some of the UK’s key sectors through investment in long-term capital.

Bruntwood SciTech’s portfolio ranges from medtech and digital start-ups to global life sciences companies. Today it is centred around projects in Manchester’s Innovation District - the Oxford Road Corridor, Cheshire, Birmingham and Leeds. Liverpool also features strongly in its forward plans.

Bruntwood SciTech offers an ‘all inclusive’ stimulus for start-ups, providing a fully comprehensive business support structure for growth; giving fledgling enterprises at the cutting edge of innovation the on-site professional assistance they need to flourish.

The business is driven by its overarching purposes – to create thriving cities across the UK city regions. With questions being asked about the reality of Britain delivering on the Northern Powerhouse agenda, Bruntwood SciTech is already coming up with some hugely impressive answers.

• Over £160m is already being invested at the internationally renowned Alderley Park, which will see the development of new sports and leisure facilities, farm shop, gastropub and up to 275 new homes alongside a further £10m of investment which was recently unveiled for the development of additional laboratories to meet the growing demand at the site. The 150,000 sq ft Glasshouse, opening in Autumn, will become a new hub for tech and forward-thinking innovative businesses.
• The Citylabs campus, which is a joint venture between Manchester Science Partnerships and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, is undergoing a £60m expansion to create Citylabs 2.0 and 3.0. German-based global diagnostics company QIAGEN has announced that Citylabs 2.0 will be its home, focussed on precision medicines and molecular diagnostics.
• Manchester Science Park, also part of Manchester Science Partnerships, was chosen as the HQ for the UK’s only Internet of Things smart city demonstrator project, CityVerve. It is also home to a co-innovation hub, ‘Mi-IDEA’delivered in partnership with Cisco’ a ‘living lab’ test bed and Tesla Power Pack Battery.
• Circle Square, Manchester’s newest city centre neighbourhood, will see the £750m development of 1.2m square feet of commercial workspace, two hotels, 100,000 sq ft of retail and leisure space, multi-storey car park and public realm alongside 1,700 new homes, as part of a joint venture between Bruntwood SciTech and Select Property Group.
• Platform, the recently re-furbished Bruntwood SciTech hub in Leeds, featuring a specialist incubator for digital tech and businesses from the creative industries, offers a range of co-working, serviced offices and commercial workspace alongside comprehensive business support packages and will create more than 1,000 jobs for the city over the next decade.
• Innovation Birmingham, the region’s leading digital and tech campus, has raised more than £18m in funding for over 280 start-ups through its incubation programmes and is looking to expand.

Bruntwood SciTech is proving to be the real deal. The company’s Chief Executive Phil Kemp says the unique approach to stimulating, developing and growing start-ups and SMEs is already paying dividends. Its incubator programmes across Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and at Alderley Park are assisting fledgling entrepreneurs on their journey from a great idea to a great business.

Kemp said: “We are focusing on the long-term regeneration of our cities and have a passion for helping companies to form, scale and grow, ultimately enabling UK plc to be competitive in a post Brexit world. We have an aggressive and imaginative plan to grow our asset base in the cities where we are currently established. Exciting things are happening.

“In Manchester the expansion of QIAGEN sticks out for me. In contrast to all the negativity around Brexit, here is a German company looking to invest in the UK, specifically into Manchester and in a ground-breaking area – genomics will have profound effects on people not only in Greater Manchester but also the UK, Europe and the world.

“The potential in Birmingham, where we’ve invested in Innovation Birmingham, is vast. The site is located where HS2 will run into the city. The knowledge district runs right up to where the platform will be. Get off the train and you’ll walk straight into the innovation district.

“One of the great success stories at Innovation Birmingham is Gymshark, an online fitness clothing business, set up by a graduate from Aston University in his garage, which has gone from zero revenue to £500 million since 2012. They are part of our Serendip open innovation programme for enterprises, which helps global corporates and the public sector to innovate via collaboration with SMEs. We’re looking forward to helping them grow as we continue to expand in the city.”

Case study: Blueberry Therapeutics, Alderley Park

As a fledgling small business, Blueberry Therapeutics needed a base where it could turn a great idea into a genuine success story – without breaking the bank. The skin treatments research specialists say they haven’t looked back since locating on Alderley Park.

The business is developing a series of new treatments for dermatological disorders to take into the American market once it successfully make its New Drug Application in under two years’ time.

Chief Executive Dr John Ridden said: “Alderley Park as a science park has been extremely helpful. We were the first to sign a lease to take laboratory and office space and with that a virtual company with great ideas, I.P, and a plan suddenly is real. “We were able to lease equipment here as well.

“We didn’t want to be spending a lot on equipment, so we had an equipped lab, internet, telephones. It was all here. Alderley Park is a great place for a company like ours, which is a drugs discovery and development company.

“We work with about five companies at Alderley Park right now, so in terms of drug discovery and development we have all the companies and assets on-site to help move programmes forward.

“The positioning is absolutely fabulous from a getting around the globe point of view. We have an airport 30 minutes away and it’s two hours to London by train. The connectivity is excellent. We often try to encourage partners of ours to come and visit and I think they are in awe when they come to the reception because it’s such a beautiful, beautiful place.”

With so many spades in the ground already, here is a geographical overview of Bruntwood SciTech

Manchester

Manchester Science Park

Close to the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), the campus is home to a rich cluster of over 150 knowledge-based businesses and over 2,000 people attracted by the specialist science and tech facilities and equipment.

The heart of the Park is the Bright Building. Opened in 2017, it was purposefully designed to maximise customer interaction in order for innovative ideas to develop, and valuable partnerships to form. The building includes open communal workspace, a gym, cafe, flexible 200-person event space, sports kit drying rooms, and secure cycle storage.

Science and tech businesses located at Manchester Science Park have access to a specialist programme of business support including dedicated access to finance and funding, talent acquisition and retention services, new markets, and professional services assistance, coupled with a vibrant social events and networking calendar.

The campus is currently undergoing further transformation to grow to 1m sq ft within the next ten years to support the growth of science and tech businesses in the region.

Citylabs campus

Citylabs brings together and accelerates collaboration between the NHS, scientific and academic communities and industry on the largest clinical academic campus in Europe. Citylabs provides opportunities for health and medical technology businesses to grow and co-create new health products in collaboration with the NHS and academia and is a Joint Venture project between Manchester Science Partnerships and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, the country’s largest Provider Trust.

The campus is already home to a cluster of digital health, medical devices, diagnostics, precision medicine and biomaterial businesses in Citylabs 1.0, who have unique direct access to the hospital Trust’s clinical resources, researchers, clinicians and procurement teams, as well as a specialist growth support and events programme.

Under the £60m expansion Citylabs 2.0 and 3.0 will become home to a globally-leading genomics campus for innovation, translational science, genomics, precision medicine and molecular diagnostics, serving both the Greater Manchester region and the wider UK. QIAGEN has been confirmed as the lead industrial partner in the creation of this world-leading hub and the company will also significantly expand its UK operations to have Citylabs 2.0 as its home, which was announced in the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy.

Real health benefits will be delivered for Manchester and the country in the creation of the clustered community at by enabling big strides to be taken in the prediction and prevention of disease through new diagnostic tests which enable earlier detection of disease and development of personalised treatments.

Circle Square

Circle Square is Manchester’s newest city centre neighbourhood. A joint venture between Bruntwood SciTech and Select Property Group, the 2.4m sq ft, £750m development is also located in the heart of the Oxford Road Corridor.

It will be home to 1.2m sq ft of commercial workspace offering a mix of designated co-working, small studios, larger floorplates for managed and leased spaces and social community spaces. A place to live, work and enjoy, it will also include; 1,700 new homes, 1000 sq ft of public realm, and 100,000 sq ft of leading-edge retail, leisure space and two hotels.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise will move into office space at Circle Square next year. The company, which currently operates across six locations in the UK, will have capacity to locate almost 300 of its employees.

Circle Square, already home to Manchester Technology Centre with its tech incubator, is a magnet to large corporations attracted by access to digital tech entrepreneurs and start-ups. It will also boast the largest amount of new green space in central Manchester in a generation as part of its development.

Alderley Park

Alderley Park, in Cheshire, is where world leading, science, innovation and stylish living come together to create a place like no other. Currently undergoing over £247m of investment, Alderley Park is home to the internationally-recognised Mereside life science campus and vibrant, fast growing community of over 200 companies..

Alderley Park also offers 150,000 sq ft of commercial workspace ideal for digital tech and forward-thinking innovative along with a wide range of amenities including a conference centre complete with a 232-seat auditorium, meeting rooms, a restaurant, gym and outdoor sports pitches.

The Mereside campus offers over 1m sq ft of ready-to-go chemistry and biology labs ranging from a single bench up to 50,000 sq ft alongside a comprehensive range of centralised scientific services all available on a pay as you go basis.

The Alderley Park Accelerator is focussed on the growth and scaling up of new and early stage life science companies, offering a variety of programmes and support services, such as the 12-week DEVELOP programme, a range of boot camps and access to an expert mentor network.

The campus is also home to national institutions including Innovate UK's Medicines Discovery Catapult and the national Antimicrobal Resistance Centre, a joint private-public initiative to support/accelerate the development of new antibiotics and diagnostics.

The Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute also made the Mereside campus its interim home following a fire in 2017 at its former location in Manchester, taking 81,000 sq ft of laboratory and office space for over 300 scientists to conduct research and development activity.

Leeds

Bruntwood SciTech’s hub in Leeds is Platform, standing directly above the city’s mainline railway station. The recently fully-refurbished Platform provides a major new strategic creative and technology centre in the heart of Leeds city centre and will create more than 1,000 jobs for the city through its Tech Incubator for start-ups in the digital and creative industries.

Facilities include co-working and serviced space as well as a customer lounge for networking, roof terrace, strong community events programme, and specialist business support programme which includes access to finance, intellectual property advice, business mentoring and resource planning.

Bruntwood SciTech is keen to continue its growth in Leeds as it continues to work closely with the city’s public, private and academic authorities to help grow the city’s strengths in science and technology.

Birmingham

Innovation Birmingham is the region’s leading digital and tech campus, with co-working, office, meeting and event space as well as highly specified business support programmes for innovators, entrepreneurs and investors looking to develop or fund innovative digital start-ups with high growth potential.

The campus is home to over 170 companies, employing over 1000 people. Over 330 start-ups have benefited from the campus’ Serendip open innovation programme to date, working with national partners including National Express, Barclays, Tata Motors and Gymshark and collectively raising over £18 million in start-up funding.

Innovation Birmingham is also at the heart of the West Midlands’ plans for a 5G test bed and is located next to the planned terminal for HS2.

Case study: Stoller Biomarker Discover Centre, Citylabs

Cancer drug treatments will be better targeted for patients thanks to pioneering work by the Stoller Biomarker Discover Centre at Citylabs in Manchester. Bruntwood SciTech’s Citylabs campus is the perfect location for the job, according to the centre’s director Professor Tony Whetton.

The Discover Centre specialises in finding protein markers in blood which can stop patients being given treatments that fail to improve their conditions. It ends the ‘hit-or-miss’ process where doctors prescribe drugs that may, or may not, be effective along the treatment journey.

The centre succeeded in getting a grant to establish the best and largest proteomic centre in the region and worked with Manchester Science Partnerships to develop high-end laboratory space at Citylabs. Prof Whetton said: “The key thing for me about Citylabs is location, location, location.

“Manchester is one of the best centres to undertake clinical and pre-clinical research. We’re on the site of the largest NHS Trust in the country and there is a really large clinical base, and two or three hundred yards away we have two of the UK’s major universities.

“We also have local industry, local healthcare industry colleagues and local clinical research colleagues around us as well. And we can find those in Citylabs as well as elsewhere in Manchester – at Manchester Science Park for example.”