Urban&Civic plans to build a new Covid-19 sequencing laboratory at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire.
The company – bought by Wellcome Trust last year – would oversee the development of a two-storey modular building, including roughly 18,200 sq ft of space across four labs at the Hinxton campus.
The temporary building would be used for three years to process genome sequencing related to the coronavirus pandemic. Campus staff working on projects associated with Covid-19 would move into the new building, allowing other employees whose work had been displaced during the pandemic to return to other buildings.
The 807,000 sq ft campus already has outline planning permission for a broader mixed-use expansion, for which Urban&Civic is acting as master developer, including flexible workspace and 1,500 homes. However, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which is also leading on the work, said the new lab space is needed “as soon as possible” and that “the urgency to expedite work on site” means a standalone planning application is necessary.
Work on the building is expected to start in the autumn and to complete next spring.
The campus is home to the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute.
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