The UK Life Sciences Real Estate Annual Conference
Wed Oct 07, 2026
The UK Life Sciences Real Estate Annual Conference
Bringing together the capital, the science and the CRE expertise to build the sector the next decade demands
£379.00
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Speakers and Panels
Robert Evans
Carl Williams
Ruth Pardoe
Simon Francis
The UK Life Sciences Sector Is Being Rebuilt From the Ground Up. Literally.
The UK life sciences sector is in the middle of a structural shift that comes along once in a generation. A government committing up to £1 billion in manufacturing and R&D investment. A biotech VC market recovering sharply, with £552 million raised in Q1 2026 alone, up 17% quarter-on-quarter. Clinical trial reform cutting setup times from 250 days to 122. And a wave of international M&A - from Eli Lilly to Amgen - validating UK-originated science assets at the highest levels.
Behind all of it is real estate. 3.7 million square feet of lab and innovation space under construction across London, Oxford and Cambridge. A £1 billion expansion at the London Cancer Hub. A £3 billion land deal at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. And a pipeline of new clusters, from Whitechapel to White City, from Manchester to the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, transforming where UK science happens and who profits from it.
For CRE professionals, this is the moment. The deals are moving. The capital is flowing. The occupiers — biotechs, pharma, academia, NHS — are actively looking for space. The question is not whether this sector will grow. The question is who will be in the room when it does.
Five Questions This Summit Will Answer
- Where are the real investment opportunities in UK life sciences real estate — and which markets are already overheated?
- How is the government's £1 billion life sciences investment programme reshaping development economics — and how can developers and investors access it?
- What do life sciences occupiers actually need from their real estate in 2026 — and are developers building the right product?
- As M&A activity accelerates and UK biotech assets attract global acquirers, how does that reshape the occupier base — and what does it mean for lease risk?
- How are the UK's emerging clusters — Manchester, Birmingham, the Oxford-Cambridge Arc — closing the gap on London, and what does a winning regional life sciences strategy actually look like?
How You'll Do More Business
The UK life sciences real estate market is not a niche. It is the fastest-growing, most policy-backed, most internationally validated commercial real estate opportunity in Britain right now — and the window to establish position is compressing fast. The developers, investors, and advisors who build relationships in this sector today will be the ones executing the deals of the next decade. This summit exists to accelerate that process.
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To request disability-related accommodations, please contact lucrezia.manzo@bisnow.com no later than seven business days before the event.
Agenda
| Time | Activity |
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8:00 AM 8:50 AM |
Registration, Networking, and Breakfast
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8:50 AM 9:00 AM |
Welcome from Bisnow!
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9:00 AM 9:45 AM |
Money's Back. Now What? — Capital, M&A and the New Lab Investment Thesis
When M&A becomes the working exit and the IPO window stays shut, what changes for tenant covenant strength, lease durability and institutional appetite for new UK lab assets? With £516M in Q1 2026 VC, Lilly's $7.8B Centessa deal and £520M in LSIMF biomanufacturing grants reshaping the capital stack, this panel moves past whether capital is back and gets to the harder question: where does the next 200,000 sq ft of UK lab demand actually come from in 2027 — and who is writing the cheques?
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9:45 AM 10:30 AM |
Three Tenants, Three Buildings — Leasing for Pharma, Bioprocessing and the AI Cohort
Pharma scale-ups, vaccine and bioprocessing operators, and the AI drug discovery cohort are signing radically different leases for radically different buildings in the same London clusters. With Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind collectively taking over 900,000 sq ft in the Knowledge Quarter — the same pipeline that life sciences was targeting — this panel asks which tenant type defines the next cycle of UK lab investment, and what happens to a building specced for a Cambridge biotech when an AI firm takes the headline lease.
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10:30 AM 10:45 AM |
Networking Break!
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10:45 AM 11:30 AM |
Beyond the Golden Triangle — The Regional Manufacturing Story Rewriting UK Life Sciences Real Estate
The £520M LSIMF is being deployed outside the M25 first, and the deals back it up: Fujifilm's £400M Teesside CDMO, Stevenage's 1.6M sq ft Elevate Quarter, UK Biobank's £127.6M Manchester anchor, and Birmingham's LSIMF-backed GMP cleanroom programme. For the first time, the North West ranked second in UK lab take-up in 2025 — ahead of the South East. This panel covers what's genuinely different about building for biomanufacturing versus discovery, and closes on where the next Fujifilm-scale facility lands.
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11:30 AM 12:15 PM |
From Bench to Building — The Wet vs Dry Design Decision and What It Means for Every CapEx Budget in the Room
The cost cliff is real: £250–£450/sqft for CAT B wet fit-out versus £90–£150/sqft for dry. HVAC accounts for 60–80% of total lab energy. Slab-to-slab runs 5.0–5.5m for wet versus 3.6–4.2m for dry. AI-compute dry labs are now hitting 400–600W/sqm — approaching data hall territory. This is the technical heartland of the day, asking the question every developer in the room is wrestling with: can you still spec a building that flexes between conventional wet, GMP and AI compute without overbuilding for any of them — or is the era of generic lab-enabled shell-and-core over?
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12:15 PM 2:00 PM |
Lunch and Networking Break!
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2:45 PM 3:30 PM |
Beyond the Building — Creating the Campuses Where Life Sciences Companies Choose to Stay
The best UK life sciences campuses are not just real estate products — they are ecosystems. The developers and operators who have cracked tenant retention aren't winning on square footage or lease terms alone. They're winning on the sense of place they've built: the density of peer companies, proximity to clinical and academic partners, quality of shared amenity, wellbeing infrastructure, and the feeling — hard to define but immediately recognisable — that being on this campus accelerates what you're trying to do scientifically. This panel asks what it actually takes to build a life sciences campus with genuine gravitational pull, how developers create communities rather than just clusters, and as the UK's lab pipeline doubles, how you ensure your asset is the one occupiers fight to get into rather than treat as a stepping stone.
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3:30 PM 4:15 PM |
London's 2 Million Sq Ft Question — Bull vs Bear: Can the Market Absorb the Pipeline, or Has Some of It Been Built for Tenants Who Aren't Coming?
London lab stock is nearly doubling to 2 million sq ft by year-end, with the Knowledge Quarter pipeline running to 2.9 million sq ft by 2032. The bull case is well-funded: London is the only city combining clinical research density, the AI ecosystem, capital and talent. The bear case is equally real: it's the most expensive lab product in Europe to build and operate, power is constrained, and the ecosystem premium is being tested against AI tenants happy to pay premium office rent for office-spec floors. Format is moderated debate — not polite consensus — with independent voices on both sides. The audience leaves with the central argument of the year.
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4:15 PM 5:00 PM |
Closing Networking!
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