First images of £650m research institute in the heart of London

THESE images give the first glimpse inside London’s new £650 million superlab.

The Franc i s Crick Institute, a million square-feet complex next to St Pancras International station, will become Europe’s biggest biomedical research institute as scientists help f i ght some of the 21 s t centur y ’s deadliest diseases.

More than 100 l a bs i nsi de t he 12-storey glass-fronted building will help scientists investigate the basic bi ol o g i c a l proc e s s e s underly i ng human health. By the New Year there will be 1, 250 sc ienti sts and 250 support staff at the Crick.

Research teams aim to find new preventions, treatments and drugs for conditions including c ancer, heart disease, strokes and degenerative illnesses such as motor neurone disease.

The institute in Midland Road is named after the late Nobel Prizewinner Francis Crick, a molecular biologist, biophysicist and neuroscientist. Its chief executive Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize-winner himself, told the Standard: “The mission is to do what we call discovery research, that is work that’s aimed at understanding how living things, such as ourselve s, work, and using that knowledge and understanding to h e l p p r o mo t e i mp r o v e me n t in human health.

“Nearly all the major improvements in significant disease such as cancer are built on better knowledge about how cancerous cells and cells more generally work. If we don’t understand that, we can never actually develop new ways of treating or managing disease. This will be one of the hubs for discovering knowledge to help us t ackle di sease.” Researchers already working in the labs include a King’s College London team investigating how yeast cells grow and divide, as they share properties with human cells.

Colleagues from UCL are research- ing how human genes switch on and off, because knowing this could help slow or halt motor neurone disease.

The technology in the institute, funded through the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, University College London, Imperial College London and King’s College London, allows scientists to do 100 experiments in the same time just one took 20 years ago. Its work ethos is modelled on tech firms such as nearby Google, as staff chat over coffee on sofas around the atrium.

A third of the building is below ground, but Sir Paul dismissed fears there would be hazardous diseases on-site.