The UK's life sciences sector has built a world-class reputation for innovation, yet the capital they need to scale often comes from overseas. Chloe Gibson, senior associate in the real estate team at Mills & Reeve, considers what this means for the science parks, innovation campuses and specialist real estate that support their growth.
The UK life sciences sector continues to be one of the country's most compelling innovation success stories. From Cambridge and Oxford to emerging regional clusters, the UK has built a world-class ecosystem of universities, researchers and innovative businesses. Yet despite this strength, a familiar challenge remains: scaling companies beyond the early stages of growth.
The UK is highly effective at generating life sciences start-ups, but later-stage funding remains more limited than in competing markets, particularly the US. As companies move into clinical development, many require significant additional investment. Where that capital is unavailable domestically, businesses increasingly look overseas for funding, partnerships or even relocation.
This is often characterised as a shortage of UK capital, but the reality is more nuanced. US investors are not simply writing bigger cheques. They frequently bring specialist biotech expertise, deep sector networks, experience of navigating complex regulatory processes and established routes to commercialisation. Life sciences is also an unusually challenging sector to finance. Drug development can take more than a decade, requires significant capital and carries inherent scientific and regulatory risk. As a result, specialist investors tend to dominate the market.
Recent research from Bidwells paints a striking picture. Since 2022, of every £1 invested in UK university spinouts at growth stage, only 8p came from all-UK investor syndicates. In the year to date (January to September 2026), 89% of growth-stage funding rounds included at least one overseas investor, with international capital now playing a defining role in the scale-up journey for many life sciences companies. The same research found that the foreign-investor share of growth-stage funding has risen from 78% in 2018-21 to 89% in 2026, underlining the increasingly important role overseas capital plays in helping UK companies scale.
Why does this matter for the built environment? Because investment in life sciences is about far more than backing individual companies. Every successful scale-up creates demand for specialist real estate, from laboratories and R&D facilities to innovation campuses and science parks. When businesses can access the capital needed to grow, they take more space, create highly skilled jobs and strengthen the wider ecosystem around them.
Cambridge alone attracted £9.7 billion of venture capital between 2016 and 2025, making it one of only two locations outside London with meaningful depth of life sciences investment. Yet even within one of Europe's leading science clusters, access to later-stage capital remains a challenge, raising questions about how much of that growth ultimately remains in the UK.
The implications extend beyond individual occupiers. Successful life sciences clusters rely on a pipeline of companies progressing from incubator and grow-on space to larger laboratory, R&D and advanced manufacturing facilities. The investment case for many science parks and innovation campuses is therefore underpinned by the assumption that promising businesses can continue to grow within the UK. If companies increasingly look overseas for funding and expansion opportunities, there is a risk that some of the economic activity that supports these real estate ecosystems follows them.
However, notwithstanding the challenges, there are reasons for optimism. Funding conditions appear more stable than they have been and investor appetite remains strong, supported by long-term demographic trends, scientific innovation and the UK's continued reputation as a global research leader. The scale-up gap is also increasingly recognised at a national level; speaking at this year’s Labour Party Conference, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said: "I refuse to let Britain be a country that generates the great ideas, only for other countries to build and scale them."
Overseas capital is not necessarily a threat. Done well, it brings growth, jobs and confidence into the ecosystem. Therefore, the real question is not whether international investors are involved, but how the benefits of overseas capital can be harnessed (or balanced) to ensure that the economic value, talent, R&D activity and real estate demand generated by the UK science it is invested into ultimately remains in the UK.
The UK's challenge is no longer just creating world-class science. It is capturing more of the value that science creates.
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