Breakthrough, but Faster

We live in an era of just-in-time logistics and near-instant availability of goods and services.

17 Feb 2022 Dr John Baker, Senior Vice President, Product Portfolio & Innovation, Abcam

Our purpose is to enable breakthroughs by serving life scientists to achieve their mission, faster. Abcam’s vision is to become the most influential life sciences company for researchers worldwide, supporting research, diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

We live in an era of just-in-time logistics and near-instant availability of goods and services. Physical retail shopping, hailing a taxi on the street, even cooking dinner – all of these have become optional in a world where almost everything is now on-demand in a way never seen before. Why should it be any different in the world of life science research? Now researchers across academia and industry can rely on the superfast delivery of the biological research tools necessary to continue their work. Abcam is one of those enablers, providing antibodies, assay kits, and other essential tools to researchers, accompanied with a wealth of accurate data.

Abcam’s success is in many ways a product of an innovative ecosystem that can cultivate and nurture research-related enterprises. Envisaged in 1998 by two Cambridge academics, Jonathan Milner and Tony Kouzarides, as a means of addressing a shortage of research tools of a sufficient quality to study a common and debilitating illness in the UK, breast cancer, Abcam was founded at one side of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc.

Abcam’s early growth was supported by the presence of the capital and mentorship of entrepreneurs like David Cleevely, who provided vital seed-stage funding and expertise as a consultative mentor to the company, and other angel investors within a nurturing and sympathetic research cluster. Abcam is now listed on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, with a market capitalisation in excess of £3B, and has become one of the most successful life science companies in the world. Today, less than 10% of Abcam’s business is in the UK; the remainder reflects the global distribution of life science research, with ~ 45% in the US, 20% in EMEA, and 20% in China. Abcam’s influence has considerably grown – over half of all life sciences research papers published globally in 2019 cited at least one Abcam product, a truly staggering statistic. In addition, Abcam was recently voted in Glassdoor’s 5 “best places to work in the UK” for the second consecutive year, and recognised as one of “Britain’s most admired companies” by “Management Today”.

Increasing the understanding of the inner working of cells in the human body is the key to combating many major global public health issues like cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Companies like Abcam are setting standards in the way discoveries are made and translated into potential benefits for society enabling both academic and industrial laboratories to better understand diseases and improve diagnoses and treatments.

Biological reagents, such as antibodies, can be supplied with the specificity and consistency required for projects spanning from fundamental research to development, commercial manufacturing and clinical applications. Understanding the details of Abcam’s offerings isn’t necessary to understand its relevance and necessity for research and development in the life sciences in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc and across the world: what’s important to understand is that Abcam offers a ‘bench-to-bedside’ approach allowing scientists to de-risk every stage of the process and accelerate their research programme.

A cursory look at Abcam’s catalogue of biological tools also reveals disease-centric expertise beyond the engineering of antibodies and demonstrates the depth and breadth of disciplines needed to address major societal issues, such as cancer. The tumour microenvironment, for example, describes the dynamic interactions between cancer cells and the local tissue they grow in. Studying the tumour microenvironment helps to bring insights into some of the key processes behind cancerous growth including how new blood vessels are formed to feed the tumour, or how the natural anti-cancer immunity is muted. The incremental understanding of some of these processes contributes to future breakthroughs in cancer research that have the potential to positively impact human health.

Abcam’s expertise also expands into areas such as the cardiovascular system helping to achieve advances in our ability to treat heart disease – currently the cause of over a quarter of the UK’s annual deaths, an average of 460 deaths a day. This is a tangible issue that innovators like Abcam are helping to address, demonstrating the contribution to the regional and UK economy but mainly how life sciences companies can improve the way we live our lives.

As clusters develop and attract more companies and institutes, the co-location of expertise fosters better collaborations. Abcam’s headquarters in Cambridge are located only a street away from the NHS Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the Royal Papworth Hospital. In October 2021, Abcam announced further collaboration with the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, allowing for greater research into the early detection of cancer in the health system. A short cycle away, students from prestigious institutes such as Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the Department of Biochemistry or the Department of Pharmacology, can use Abcam’s innovative reagents for research that one day can ultimately benefit the medical and clinical public health endpoint, only a hundred yards away.

Being part of an active and dynamic cluster also gives Abcam the best opportunity to hire, retain, and grow the best talent in life sciences and digital, and to offer its people truly rewarding, impactful, purpose-driven careers.

We’d like to think that Abcam is a success story for the Arc, and a profoundly compelling proof of concept not only for the power of chance encounters in an academic cluster, but also for the power of large companies partnering with academia, research institutes and NHS trusts for a common cause. We also know that there are many other companies like Abcam striving for social prosperity, who need support. Just as Abcam gives researchers the tools they need, when they need them, we need to ensure enterprises in the Arc enjoy a similar advantage – getting the talent, getting the funding, getting the collaboration, and getting the business development mentorship necessary to enable or make similar breakthroughs.