Bruntwood SciTech’s Alderley Park provides over 1m sq ft of state-of-the-art office and lab space to businesses in the life sciences sector as well as support for companies across their entire life cycle. There are now over 150 companies on site and over 2,000 employees – up from 47 in the first year.

All companies on site have access to Alderley Park’s flexible infrastructure and scientific services, which allows them to expand as their business develops and grows. The site houses the UK’s only park-shared vivarium as well as an in-house imaging facility.

Alderley Park’s Accelerator, powered by BioCity, provides structured support through bespoke one-to-one engagement and expertise both onsite and offsite to the scaleup entrepreneurs and leaders. Subjects covered include a focus on the scaling challenges of leadership skills and development, access to finance and international markets. Companies are helped to raise their profiles and acquiring the right talent and skills through Alderley’s links with universities.

The Expert Mentor Network made up of more than 220 senior industry leaders provides access to senior global pharma personnel and their networks as well as finance executives. Regular network events are also held during which companies can ask the mentors for support in specific areas of business.

In response to Covid, alongside the wider role Alderley Park played as host of a national lighthouse laboratory, Bruntwood SciTech developed an online hub so that all business support related information was held in one central place and the Alderley Park Accelerator immediately moved all business support programmes and workshops online.

A new enhancement this year is the Oncology Development Programme which Alderley Park hopes will be a new UK model for drug discovery and development. It brings together local and national cancer expertise with global pharma companies, the Alderley Park Accelerator and the site-based scientific services. The aim is to establish up to six new oncology-focussed companies, to enhance the entrepreneurial skills and activities of the UK cancer research community, and ultimately to have a major impact on the health and wellbeing of patients. The ScaleUp Institute will monitor with interest the  developments and outcomes of this programme as a model to encourage greater collaboration between scaleups, the public and the private sectors.

Independent analysis of the science park has shown that companies benefiting from support on site grow two times faster, raise 2.5 times more investment and are three times less likely to fail than equivalent firms.

Alderley Park [Annual Review 2020] website