Crammed into a small, cluttered meeting room at the Moller Centre in the grounds of Churchill College, the boss of one of Cambridge’s most valuable companies is venting his concerns over the city’s crowded technology cluster.
Alan Hirzel is the American chief executive of Abcam, a biotech company founded by a university scientist 20 years ago, which has expanded to become a £3bn UK-listed business supplying reagents and tools to two thirds of the world’s scientific researchers.
Hirzel, 51, has earlier led a meeting of senior colleagues in a hired room at the Moller Centre, a temporary location before Abcam’s move to its £25m, 100,000sq ft new headquarters on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in the south of the city.
Abcam is moving from its office on the Science Park, developed in the 1970s by Trinity College, to the new campus, marking the latest expansion of the Cambridge tech cluster, which has been built over the past few decades on the back of its world-class university churning out talented engineering and science graduates and valuable intellectual property.
