Life Sciences Campus set for West Midlands

Medical innovation in the Midlands is set to be led through the proposed £210 million Birmingham Health Innovation Campus, which is expected to attract significant inward investment and accelerate the development of new drugs, diagnostics and healthcare technologies.

The new 10-acre Campus will join an established critical cluster of health excellence led by Birmingham Health Partners (BHP) - a strategic alliance between the University of Birmingham and two co-located NHS Foundation Trusts - University Hospitals Birmingham and Birmingham Women’s and Children’s.

It is being developed through a long-term collaboration between the University and the UK’s leading property provider for the science and technology sector, Bruntwood SciTech, a 50:50 joint venture between Bruntwood and Legal & General.

In phase one the Campus will provide up to 657,000 sq ft of lab, office and incubation space, alongside a 133,000 sq ft, six-storey building housing a new innovation centre – the Precision Health Technologies Accelerator (PHTA) - that will provide a range of prototyping, incubation and laboratory facilities for early-stage businesses and access to business support. There will also be space for larger, more established SMEs and scaleups working in medtech, precision medicine, diagnostics and digital healthcare.

With development funding from Birmingham City Council and the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership, it is envisaged that by 2030 the venture will have seen £210m investment, creating around 10,000 new jobs and delivering more than £400m GVA to the local economy.

Dr David Hardman, Managing Director of Bruntwood SciTech, said: “This is a huge opportunity for the UK’s life science sector. By creating an environment that will not only help businesses to form, scale, collaborate and grow, we will establish a new thriving life sciences hub, which will create much needed capacity for the West Midlands and help to attract further international investment to the region and beyond.

“Working alongside Birmingham Health Partners, Birmingham Health Innovation Campus will help to align academic, NHS and industry capabilities. It will also provide additional much-needed world class facilities for pioneering healthcare businesses and will bolster the UK’s position as a life sciences leader on the global stage.”

Work will begin on an extensive public consultation in the coming months, with the first phase currently set to complete in 2023.

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