Largest biomedical center in Europe opened in London
The Francis Crick Institute, the biggest medical laboratory in Europe, recently opened in London, UK. The institute, named after the co-discoverer of DNA, will focus on and examine fundamental questions about how illnesses develop to find new ways to treat conditions such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, infections and diseases of the brain.
Located behind St. Pancras station and the British Library, the £650 million building will house 1,250 scientists.
The Crick director Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize winner and former president of the Royal Society, said the center would “attract brilliant, bold and creative scientists from the UK and around the world”. He is among the first scientists to move into the building.
He said that the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (EU) meant that the Crick would lose a planned EU funding of £10 million a year, which the UK government would need to replace.
But he said that the country is a “great scientific nation” and the Francis Crick Institute would be a symbol that the UK was “open for business”.
Sir Paul Nurse and his team are studying cell division which plays an important role in understanding how cancer and other diseases develop.
The Crick is mainly funded the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust.
Old and cramped laboratories at Mill Hill in north London, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Potters Bar, Hertfordshire will be replaced by the new building.
Although the main focus of the Crick will be the biological processes underlying human health and disease, it will also do “translational research”, which aims to turn lab discoveries into treatments for patients.
The institute has a partnership with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.
The Francis Crick Institute building has a total floor space of 93,000 sq m (23 acres), which is equivalent to more than 17 football pitches. It has eight floors above ground and four underground floors.
The basement floors house electron microscopes and magnetic resonance scanners as well as a large animal research facility.
They have vibration resistant so that underground trains and traffic will not affect sensitive equipment in the basement.
The biomedical center has an annual budget of about £130 million.
