Biosciences incubator on former pharma site welcomes first tenants

The former Merck research plant in Lanarkshire was reborn yesterday as BioCity Scotland, an incubator facility which has already signed up two tenants.

One is a start-up firm, Oracle Bio, founded by former Merck researchers Lorcan Sherry and John Waller specialising in contract research and consultancy for the pharmaceutical sector.

Oracle Bio will be joined by Pharmacells, the stem cell specialist currently based at Hillington Park Innovation Centre in Glasgow.

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Though the two firms will between them employ just a handful of people, backers of the new centre said yesterday that they had initially expected it to take up to nine months from launch to land their first occupants.

Agreements with Oracle Bio and Pharmacells were signed off last week, and discussions with “several” other potential tenants are ongoing.

Designed to house existing biotech firms while also creating new ones, BioCity Scotland is a 75-25 joint venture between BioCity Nottingham and Roslin BioCentre. The 23-acre site along the M8 has been donated by what is now known as MSD, the company created following Merck’s £30 billion acquisition of Schering-Plough.

That deal led to a global rationalisation that saw the New-house facility closed down in 2010 with the loss of some 250 jobs. Rather than attempt to sell the specialist site in a difficult market, MSD opted to donate the facility to BioCity Scotland, which was formed specifically for that purpose.

Glenn Crocker, chief executive of BioCity Nottingham, said it would probably cost £80 million to build and equip a facility equivalent to the Merck plant.

It includes 130,000sq ft of office and lab space, a £29m compound management facility completed not long before the plant’s closure, plus an array of other specialist equipment.

“The main part of the show is mass spectrometers,” Crocker said. “There are about a dozen of them sitting around here, and they cost about £200,000 each, so it’s a difficult thing for a small start-up company with limited funding to go out and buy.”

BioCity Scotland has about £1.5m in initial funding to cover running costs, including European grants amounting to some £200,000.

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It will be run on a day-to-day basis by managing director Ian Webster, a director of BioCity Nottingham and a former director of Boots. The chairman is Louis Nisbet, currently chairman of BioCity Nottingham, who will be joined on the board by other representatives from BioCity Nottingham, Roslin BioCentre and the Scottish bioscience community.

Crocker said the site has the potential to be even more successful than BioCity Nottingham, one of Europe’s largest life sciences incubators with 70 companies employing 600 people. BioCity Scotland aims to be home to 50 companies with a combined staff of 500 within five years.

Finance secretary John Swinney, who performed the official launch, welcomed the potential of the new facility.

“Today is undoubtedly a day to be very optimistic about what this facility can achieve for Scotland,” he said.

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