Golden opportunities

Rivalries. The universities in the southeast of England are rife with them. Cambridge and Oxford have competed for academic glory throughout their august histories. More recently, both have vied for bragging rights with their bigger, brasher competitor — London. And even within London, Imperial College, University College and King's College have long jockeyed for top position.

Now, out of necessity or perhaps a realization that the real competition lies outside Britain, these sometime rivals are combining forces in a number of ways — strategic alliances, joint appointments and shared infrastructure among them.

Ken Powell, who left a professorship at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London to found Arrow Therapeutics in the city, says such cooperation is long overdue, and still in woefully short supply. "There needs to be more collaboration," Powell says, adding that it's "crazy" for London universities to compete "when the real competition is MIT, Harvard and Stanford".

Tony Jones's job as head of the life sciences part of the business network London First is to stop anxiety about 'who's on top' and focus on collaborations. Academic–industrial partnerships can cut through the competition, he says.

For instance, the London-based global pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline is investing in an imaging centre at Hammersmith Hospital in the city, which is itself affiliated with a number of area universities. North Carolina-based contract research organization Quintiles Transnational is running a clinical trial out of Guy's Hospital that could herald others — to further tap London's large, diverse population of patients for testing drug safety and efficacy.

After years of competing for both prestige and a limited pool of funds, Jones says academic institutions in London seem more willing to get together. For instance, London Higher — the umbrella organization for the city's universities — covers 42 educational institutions, which are pooling their resources to look at issues such as attracting more international talent, especially in terms of students. A bigger population of foreign students could help revitalize the country's knowledge economy, especially in areas like mathematics, physics, and chemistry, where home-grown interest has flagged in recent years. And Genesis, an annual party-turned-meeting of the London Biotechnology Network, is matching academics with companies, and companies with venture capitalists.

Leszek Borysiewicz, deputy rector at Imperial, agrees that there's a problem with recruiting students in core disciplines. "We need people to enter basic science," Borysiewicz says, to take the place of senior investigators approaching retirement. One solution is to tell prospective students that pursuing science and technology degrees will help them land good jobs. Another is to come up with more equitable compensation packages, a route Imperial has taken and Borysiewicz hopes more area institutes will follow.

Improvements in infrastructure can also attract more people to the region, and Imperial has embarked on an ambitious building scheme to do just that. The university is investing US$179 million this year alone into improving its ageing campus. Imperial is building a new facility for engineering at its South Kensington campus, constructing a developmental biology centre with GlaxoSmithKline on its Hammersmith campus, and putting US$61 million into St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, primarily to create new facilities for clinical researchers. "That level of expenditure is going to go on for a protracted period," Borysiewicz says.

Borysiewicz adds that although the universities within the 'golden triangle' are essentially competitive, the sky-high cost of the technology needed for the big issues is necessitating strategic collaborations. Imperial and University College London, for instance, have jointly created the London Centre for Nanotechnology. "It would have been very difficult to do it separately," Borysiewicz says.

Collaborations extend beyond infrastructure and joint institutes, to individual research projects. For example, Imperial and St Mary's are piloting a scheme where medical robots would make the rounds to check on patients. And Imperial is exploring similar research collaborations with long-time rivals Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Robert Ian Lechler, rector of King's College London, is all for cooperation, but doesn't dismiss the power of healthy competition. Using a European football analogy, he sees Imperial — where he was director of immunology — as a team in the premiership, and King's as a championship team aiming to raise itself to that next level.

Lechler is doing some heavy recruiting to improve King's ranking, midway through a plan to bring in 14 research chairs in 12 months, with over US$3.5 million of funding. Among the newcomers is Graham Lord, a former PhD student of Lechler's whom he has lured away from Harvard. King's is also holding its own in the infrastructure stakes, with a US$45 million cancer cell-biology building opening at the year's end, and fundraising under way for a clinical neuroscience block.

University College London, too, is making strategic investments, especially in neuroscience. The university's Queen Square campus is becoming a London hub for the discipline, with research hospitals, lab space and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in close proximity. A new building is set to open in 2007.

Although London's status as an academic powerhouse is clearly on the rise, the city still needs to create space for biotech, agree Jones and Powell. Arrow has managed to carve out a space for its 200 or so employees south of the Thames, but most fledgling companies aren't so lucky. That's why London First has helped promote an incubator in Camden.

Cambridge, on the other hand, has an abundance of space — especially after the bursting of the dot-com and telecomm bubbles a few years ago. The city was once as close to redundancy-proof as possible; even casualties of the Glaxo–SmithKline merger soon found work (see Nature 414, 4–5; 2001). But now both landlords and employees are facing a different reality.

A few years ago Boston area biotech company Millennium moved in, only to pull out six weeks later when the company's management retrenched. And a building once occupied by biotech firm Organon is under renovation.

"The demand for occupancy in science and business parks fell off a cliff," says Jeremy Fairbrother, senior bursar at Cambridge and landlord of the university's science park. "But that's life."

That doesn't mean there aren't companies to fill the spaces waiting in the wings. It's just that they're a different breed — smaller, often mixing information technology with hard science and, perhaps more importantly, with market-ready products and services. Fairbrother points to Vectura, which aims to deliver insulin to diabetics through inhalers, or Abcam, a self-described "Amazon of antibodies", providing the proteins over the Internet.

Fairbrother is also seeing people look further afield. They are still finding jobs, but they may have to travel around the edges of the triangle to get to them. One Cambridge telecomm worker whom Fairbrother knows keeps his home and family in Cambridge and commutes to London — about two hours of train travel a day. "You have to look a bit wider," he says.

Jeff Solomon, head of Cambridge area biotech network ERBI, says the net number of biotech jobs in the area has remained unchanged over the past few years, but the overall landscape has shifted considerably. "There has not been growth in biotech employment in this region, but neither has there been shrinking." New companies have sprung up where other have withered, and some big players, most notably Celltech — purchased by Brussels-based drug company UCB — have ended up folded into others. Solomon sees that as healthy. "If it's not going on, there's something wrong with your region," he says.

But there are positive signs, too. Although no Cambridge-area companies went public last year, they raised a substantial amount of capital. The region also made strides in establishing alliances among area companies — something that will make the ones that remain stronger in the long run.

One such company, VASTox, is benefiting from its place in the triangle, says company CEO Jon Tinsley. The firm spun out of labs in Oxford, Cambridge and London, raised a significant amount of cash last year and is "trying not to spend it", Tinsley says.

VASTox, which focuses on providing services in biological chemistry, rather than creating its own therapeutics, has been able to recruit scientists from all three cities in the triangle, and beyond "We've actually recruited someone from the United States," Tinsley says.

Tinsley has experience with both academic and industrial jobs within the region. He spent time at Oxford as well as at London's Medical Research Council before joining a company that wasn't as judicious with its cash. Despite the experience, he thinks there are more opportunities in biotech than academia now, and sees the emergence of companies like London-based Arrow and Antisoma, both inching towards getting products to market, as signs that the triangle can be golden for biotech employees.

Lin Bateson, operations manager of the Oxfordshire Bioscience Network, says VASTox is typical of a handful of companies thriving at each point of the triangle. Last year, a few in each area attracted a disproportionate amount of venture capital: five companies took 68% of the US$250 million that flowed into Oxfordshire, Bateson says.

Although a few strong contenders are emerging, Bateson worries about younger companies. The government is lending a hand to tech transfer, but providing little support to spin-outs.

Meanwhile, just as universities are working to prepare students and postdocs for the time when the baby boomers retire from their academic posts, they must also set up young scientists for industrial jobs, says Nigel Thrift, now head of Oxford's division of life and environmental sciences and soon to be provost chancellor of research. The university is more reliant on industry money now, getting US$36 million a year from companies, compared with US$28 million from government and charities.

Some interactions are clearly beneficial. For example, Google is involved in Oxford's main library. And the university's chemistry department has fed many scientists, particularly medicinal chemists, into the pharmaceutical industry. But the university is upping its ante in the life sciences by building the Oxford Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology. The building will hold 550 researchers and should include many new hires, not just a reshuffling of existing faculty, Thrift says. The same goes for the Diamond Light Source, a synchrotron which uses high-energy beams of light to probe the molecular structure of many proteins and nonbiological materials. The project is hiring many new people, as staff from the older synchrotron at Daresbury, Cheshire, have decided not to make the move south (see 'A jewel in Oxford's crown'). The university also has a programme that trains physical scientists for life-science work.

Raymond Dwek, head of Oxford's biochemistry department, says the university has one of the largest collection of academic biochemists in the world — 800 in total, including about 100 professors. Dwek, who has spent more than 40 years at the university, wants his legacy to be the addition of 20 professors next year and the building of a US$154 million facility. "At a time when departments are contracting, we are expanding," Dwek says.

His successor, Kim Nasmyth, former head of the IMP in Vienna, will join and add some molecular biology strength to the chemical skills the department possesses. Nasmyth will build an institute of chromosome biology, while Dwek, a founder of Oxford Glycosciences, will turn his strengths in sugar molecules to nurturing Oxford's institute of glycobiology.

Dwek, like Borysiewicz at Imperial, Lechler at King's, and Fairbrother at Cambridge, is almost gleeful when discussing his plans to outdo his peers around the triangle. But he has a positive perspective on the benefits of such competition. "As long as the rivalry helps the science, helps the public, helps accountability, that's OK," he says. (See Leading indicators: Southeast England).

A jewel in oxford's crown

The Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire (pictured below) breaks a lot of records. Its US$668 million price tag is Britain's single biggest investment in research and development infrastructure. The synchrotron's beam lines, designed to probe the molecular nature of both proteins and non-biological materials, will be among the world's most powerful when it comes online in 2007. And the 300 highly skilled employees needed to run it represent one of the country's most ambitious scientific recruitment exercises.

But the location of the facility, in expensive Oxfordshire rather than near the older synchrotron in Daresbury, Cheshire, is also a source of serious and lingering controversy (see Nature 402, 451; 1999).

Perhaps as a result of the furore over location, only a minority of employees from the Cheshire facility have chosen to make the move south. Louise Johnson (below right), Diamond's life-science director in Daresbury, says that so far, only two of the ten scientists in her group have committed to moving with her. She says that figure is fairly representative among other Diamond group leaders.

Johnson is, however, working hard to make the Oxfordshire location an attractive one for researchers. She's able to offer tenure-track, long-term contracts. It's a substantial facility, with 2,000 square metres of research space available in the doughnut-shaped building. And Britain's Medical Research Council is funding a research complex nearby that will help technicians do their own research, rather than solely assisting others. "People are excited about being involved in a large project," says Johnson.

Paul Smaglik

Leading indicators: Southeast England

Funding

Domestic research and development funding: 1.86% of GDP.

The UK Medical Research Council alone is awarding more than US$300 million in grants for 2004–5 — a disproportionate amount of which stays in southeast England. London hosts more than a third of publicly funded research in Britain. The Wellcome Trust is the world's largest biomedical research foundation, giving out more than US$700 million a year, much of which goes to researchers in London, Cambridge and Oxford.

Biotech companies

Britain ranks fourth globally and second in Europe in number of companies.

Biotech clusters

London has more than 100 biotech companies; Cambridge has about 200; Oxford, 67.