Mayor of London launches MedCity

Mayor of London Boris Johnson trials a new technological 3 dimensional scanning device, based on a Microsoft Kinect camera, which helps detect Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, during the launch of London’s Med City at Imperial College. Photo credit: Geoff Caddick/PA

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson launched a major new initiative backed by some of the UK’s senior academics and business people that will transform the London-Oxford-Cambridge life sciences sector into a world beating power-cluster. Through MedCity, the life sciences sector in the South East will come to match the crucial position of financial services in the UK’s national economy.

The new organisation is tasked with attracting life sciences corporations large and small to the ‘golden triangle’ formed by the three UK cities, facilitating collaboration between them and the UK academic research base, and reinforcing specialist infrastructure so that the region becomes one of the premier, interconnected clusters for life science research, development, manufacturing and commercialisation.

This will create jobs, attract billions of pounds of investment and help spur the discovery of new treatments to tackle disease, propelling the sector to become a key contributor to the capital’s growth and health.

The Mayor announced that GBP2.92 million is being invested in the project by England’s university funding body – the Higher Education Funding Council for England. This is on top of GBP1.2 million funding confirmed by the Mayor of London’s office.

MedCity has been established by the Mayor of London and King’s Health Partners, Imperial College Academic Health Science Centre and UCLPartners with co-operation from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: “Together with Oxford and Cambridge we form a ‘golden triangle’ of scientific innovation and we need to channel that intellectual pre-eminence into a positive impact on our economy. MedCity will span everything from research to clinical trials to manufacturing, across biotech, med tech and health tech. I am in no doubt that having the whole ‘chain’ from small spin-offs to massive companies doing their research, clinical development and manufacturing here in London and the south east can be as important to our economy as the financial services sector is today.”

EP News Bureau – Mumbai