AI Is Upending The Buildings Life Sciences Tenants Want

The nascent UK life sciences industry was already negotiating a slowdown in demand as diminished funding for companies chills the clamour for new space. 

Now the sector has another quandary to ponder: Artificial intelligence is quickly changing the way tenants use space, and that means the buildings being developed must change as well.

“How long will we need this huge, extra-built capacity for labs as opposed to office space?” Cambridge Science Park Director Jane Hutchins said at Bisnow’s UK Life Sciences and Innovation Real Estate Annual Conference, held at the ILEC Conference Centre in London.

“It’s making it very uncertain for developers.” 

Life sciences companies on the park Hutchins manages are embracing AI and quantum computing as a way of making the experimentation and research process more efficient. 

Labs are being digitally twinned and experiments are taking place in the digital realm to cut down on unnecessary lab time, expense and waste, she said. 

That changes the balance of labs and offices companies need.

“The challenge for the built environment is that the technology [is] being driven by quantum — and AI is advancing so quickly and it's being embraced with such success and passion by the life science industry — and we've got this huge focus on wet lab and lab-enabled buildings,” she said. “We should actually be looking at labs and saying, are they office-enabled?” 

AviadoBio, a central nervous system disease-focused company that uses gene therapy as a vehicle to deliver novel applications to slow or arrest neurodegenerative diseases, is one company using space differently.

In the past, the company would have typically allocated about 60% of the space it uses to labs and 40% to write-up or office space, AviadoBio Director of Facilities Operations Vipul Bhakta said.

But the way it uses AI today means that ratio has reversed. 

“That's generally because there’s a lot of digitalisation, a lot of robotic instruments and so on,” Bhakta said. 

The company now designs and runs experiments before going into the lab to test its hypotheses, which cuts time, uses less material and has an environmental, social and corporate governance benefit, he said. 

Of the lab space it uses, about 70% utilizes fixed technology, and the other 30% is set up to be flexible, allowing it to bring in new technology as needed. 

The upshot is that buildings need to be designed with as much flexibility as possible in mind to accommodate changes in how occupiers use them. And without the direct feedback of facilities managers and data-driven design, the real estate sector is in danger of overcomplicating buildings.

“The speed in which the construction industry moves is so slow compared to the speed in which equipment and research moves,” Hawkins\Brown principal and partner Matthew Ollier said.

“By the time we've designed a building that's capable of a certain number of air changes an hour or has the vibration performance of x, it's no longer relevant because the equipment is capable of sustaining or controlling the environment far better than the building can.” 

More use of AI has a knock-on effect on power usage by life sciences companies. AI uses huge amounts of computational power, which requires huge amounts of energy. 

At the moment, owners and developers aren’t incorporating extra data centres or power supply into life sciences schemes because AI computation is happening in the cloud and doesn’t draw on power in the immediate vicinity. 

But power is an issue that the real estate industry needs to think about at a regional and national level. As usage increases, big users will come under greater scrutiny. 

“It's definitely a forward trajectory that is being embraced for all the right reasons, but it does put huge strain on the power and data infrastructure for the region, not just the buildings in the park,” Hutchins said. 

“We're engaged in a lot of conversations, not just as the science park but across all the parks in the greater Cambridge area. We're a really collaborative bunch of people, and we lobby governments as far as we can.”

If the UK can’t provide the power companies need, those companies and the industry more generally will move where the right infrastructure is available. 

“Without cost-effective access to energy, we're going to lose out to our North American competitors quite quickly,” Ollier said.