The New Frontier - Your weekly science and innovation update – 28th October 2026

Global Biotech: The mood turns

The latest Endpoints News Biopharma Sentiment Index recorded its first positive reading in four years, rising from 96 to 105 in Q3 2026. Sentiment improved across all ten measures tracked by the survey, with current business conditions reaching their highest level since the index began. Dealmaking has become the key driver of optimism, with respondents increasingly expecting acquisitions, licensing activity and capital raising to continue through the next 12 months. 

Confidence is strongest among investors and biotech firms, while larger pharmaceutical companies remain more cautious. While more than half of biotech respondents expect to increase headcount over the next year, many larger pharmaceutical businesses continue to focus on cost reduction and restructuring. This suggests that future growth demand is likely to come from scaling biotech companies, while larger pharmaceutical occupiers remain focused on restructuring and portfolio optimisation.

A number of significant UK life sciences investments in the past two weeks point to continued investor appetite for drug discovery, clinical development and medical technology.

Notable examples include:

• OMass Therapeutics, based in Oxford, securing $310mn to support its growth.
• Cambridge’s Microbiotica announcing the first close of a £36mn funding round.
• Recursion raising approximately £150mn alongside progress across its AI-enabled drug discovery pipeline.
• Cambridge-based Coherence raising $65mn in a round led by Founders Fund and OpenAI Startup Fund. The company develops minimally invasive implants and neural interfaces, with funding supporting plans for a clinical trial in patients with glioblastoma.

AI: London continues to attract frontier research

AI remains one of the fastest-growing destinations for global capital, with London at the epicentre as evidenced by recent announcements that include:

• London-based Recursive, founded by former DeepMind researcher Tim Rocktäschel and colleagues from Meta, OpenAI and Google, recently released its first AI model, Flint, following a reported $650mn funding round earlier this year. The company has chosen to scale from London.
• Anthropic is reportedly entering into consulting, with plans to embed AI consultants and engineers within client businesses. Launch is expected by the end of the year, with hubs in London and Berlin. 
• Thore Graepel, who helped build Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, has launched Metis Reasoning in London. The company’s founding claim is that large language models cannot be trusted to reason. Its founders want to apply the lessons of AlphaGo to general reasoning instead.

AI-related office take-up in London has surpassed 1mn sq ft in 2026 to date, double the full-year total for 2025.

Industrial Strategy: Following the money

The Government's latest quarterly industrial strategy update provides an indication of where future occupational demand may emerge and where big infrastructure investments are going.

More than £6.5bn of investment commitments were announced across priority growth sectors during the quarter, supporting over 27,000 jobs. Public finance support exceeded £2.4bn, while government-backed exports surpassed £6bn. 

Among the most notable announcements were:

• £400mn from GSK for a new R&D facility on Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
• £375mn expansion plans from Rubrik, including a London HQ.
• £300mn of investment linked to the Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone.
• Major manufacturing investments by Rolls-Royce.

Arguably the most important announcements, however, concern infrastructure rather than funding. Planning reforms, mayoral planning powers and efforts to accelerate grid connections all target the constraints that many science, technology and industrial developments face today: power and planning.

For those of you that follow-me on LinkedIn you may have seen my experiment – using AI to create an animated map of where industrial strategy investment has landed this year. https://lnkd.in/p/ebniFdtm

Tackling skills shortages in digital and tech

Government forecasts suggest around 800,000 digital and technology roles will need to be filled across industrial-strategy sectors between 2025 and 2035. This is made up of 550,000 new roles in priority occupations and 250,000 roles that will need replacing as people leave or retire.

The proposed response includes new Technical Excellence Colleges, expanded apprenticeship programmes and a Digital and Tech Skills Deal aimed at increasing early-career opportunities. Local authorities will also be tasked with working more closely with companies to match labour to demand. Birmingham, London, Gloucestershire, Milton Keynes and Manchester are cited locations for technical colleges. Companies that are already working with the government on work placement opportunities are Microosft, Cisco, IBM, Cognizant, Arm, Kainos, QinetiQ and AtkinsRéalis.

Access to talent is a major business challenge and a key driver of location decisions. Regions that can meet companies’ current and future skills needs are better placed to attract investment.

From start-up to stay-put

This week’s innovation announcements point to a shared ambition: not simply creating more companies, but helping them grow and keeping the benefits locally. New strategies for Greater Manchester and Oxfordshire, alongside fresh investment figures from Cambridge, put the emphasis on turning research strength into lasting economic scale.

The Equinox 2035 Strategy, targets 20 billion-dollar companies, more than £1bn of annual investment and 30,000 new innovation jobs in Oxfordshire by 2035. It aims to draw in 10 leading US VC funds and 10 UK pension funds, secure a permanent presence for six global corporations, and set up a regional Inward Investment Unit as a single point of contact for investors, corporates and developers. Oxfordshire already hosts around 3,000 high-tech firms employing about 30,000 people. These are ambitions rather than secured outcomes, but the strategy also identifies practical steps: a regional Inward Investment Unit, stronger support for growing businesses and skills pathways connecting local people with innovation jobs. The University of Oxford provides a substantial foundation, having supported more than 350 companies that have collectively attracted over £8bn since 2011.

A target that effectively doubles the high-tech workforce implies a sustained pipeline of requirements for space through to 2035. Pension-fund participation could also bring patient capital into the wider ecosystem.  For occupiers, a dedicated landing service for international firms and a push for later-stage capital should make it easier to invest and scale.

Elsewhere Mayor Bev Craig and Innovation Greater Manchester chair Andrew Hodgson launched the Greater Manchester Innovation Plan 2035. Built on five pillars – commercialisation, ecosystem navigation, investment, workforce and attracting global firms.  Priority growth sectors are Health innovation and life sciences, creative industries, clean energy, advanced manufacturing and materials, AI, Cyber and Digital, professional services and finance.

The launch follows funding announcements including the University of Manchester’s £10mn Founders Fund, £26mn for initial innovation projects through the Good Growth Fund and £50mn through the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund. Advanced materials and manufacturing, health innovation and applied AI are central to the latter programme. Importantly for property, the wider, near-£2bn Good Growth Fund is intended to unlock employment and innovation space across the city region.

Finally, new Cambridge Innovation Capital analysis, shows Cambridge-based early-stage life sciences and deep tech companies have raised £9.1bn over the past decade, with average equity per deal rising roughly five-fold to about £10mn.

The connections between these places matter too. This week’s Cambridge summit highlighted the Cambridge–Manchester partnership as a means of combining complementary strengths, alongside a renewed focus on helping companies start, scale and remain in the UK.