Most of the questions we are asked about a UK life sciences location are not about the science alone. They are about what is actually there, and whether the system is likely to remain broadly the same in five years.
Working on the ground in China over recent weeks on the EFEC UK–China Life Sciences Innovation Hub's international engagement work, I have found myself having to describe UK life sciences locations without relying on their best-known institutional names. The practical question is what an international company can actually verify about the capability, relationships and support behind the name of a place.
That question is particularly visible at the moment because [GSK has confirmed that it will move its UK research operations from Stevenage to a new centre on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus](https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/gsk-to-establish-new-flagship-rd-centre-on-cambridge-biomedical-campus-uk/), with staff moving in phases to 2029. The company has described the decision partly in terms of proximity to university science and clinical settings. Stevenage retains substantial cell and gene therapy capability, laboratory infrastructure and an established scientific community built up over many years.
So the useful question is not simply what Stevenage may lose. It is what an outside partner was reading into GSK's presence there in the first place.
A large research occupier can perform several functions at once. It trains people who later move into smaller companies. It can carry early-career scientists in numbers that smaller firms cannot. It can support infrastructure at a scale smaller organisations cannot easily fund.
It also functions as a signal. A major global company choosing to locate research activity in a place is often taken as evidence that the location itself is worth choosing.
Those functions do not change at the same speed. People and expertise may remain in the wider system, and infrastructure moves slowly. The signal changes first. The shared story about a place can change with it, years before the physical system does.
Another distinction is between density and connection. A cluster may contain many organisations without those organisations being strongly connected to each other. Companies and institutions can sit within a mile of one another and share little beyond a postcode and a recruitment pool.
The departure of a major organisation can become the test that reveals the difference. A system that can already explain how its organisations are connected is in a different position from one that has simply assumed physical proximity means interdependence.
Nothing was subtracted.
Stevenage's assets on the day after the announcement were substantially the same as the day before. What changed was comparative, and comparative change is enough.
A place can lose ground without losing anything it held.
The type of anchor also matters. Universities, hospitals and institutions such as Catapults tend to be more deeply embedded in place and relatively unlikely to relocate. A commercial company makes location decisions according to its strategic priorities, and those priorities can change. A system that depends heavily on a single commercial anchor therefore carries a different type of risk from one built on several.
There is also a time dimension. When a move is announced several years in advance, founders, investors and specialist staff do not wait until the final moving date before making decisions. They begin responding to what they expect rather than to what has physically happened. Much of the effect may therefore be determined during the transition.
For international engagement, this matters. When an overseas company is assessing a UK life sciences location, the presence of a major anchor institution can provide a useful shortcut. It reduces the need to investigate every organisation, relationship and capability before deciding whether the place deserves further attention.
I do not think using that shortcut is unreasonable. From another country, the presence of a major institution is one of the easiest things to verify.
But it remains evidence of one organisation's decision. It is not the same as evidence about the system.
When that anchor is removed, the system has to make its own capability legible. It needs to show what expertise it holds, how its organisations are connected, what support an incoming company can access, and which parts of that proposition an outside party can actually verify.
Some life sciences systems can already do this.
Others may discover, when they try, that the description was never written down because the anchor institution had been doing much of that work for them.
It is worth asking the question before circumstances force it.
If the largest name in a life sciences system were no longer there, what evidence would an outside partner still have that the system itself was worth engaging with?
Editorial note
This article reflects the working perspectives of the EFEC UK–China Life Sciences Innovation Hub and is intended to support informed discussion. It does not constitute advice or represent the official positions of any affiliated organisations or partners.
