There are some places that just seem to hum with inspiration and creativity.

The Francis Crick Institute is certainly one of them.

The people, academic institutions, and technologies that have been brought together to push the boundaries of scientific understanding here are exceptional. And they need to be – when it was conceived, the Crick was to be the most significant development in UK biomedical science for a generation.

To achieve that, and to justify the resources of so many founding partners, the Crick needed to be more than a simple relocation exercise brought about by ageing facilities at the National Institute for Medical Research and the labs at Lincolns Inn Fields. It really did need to represent a new way of doing research anchored around some of the best researchers in the world.

So, after its first decade, has it worked?

From the ground up

Where better to start than with the bricks and mortar itself. The Crick is a building like no other. It was literally built with collaboration in mind. In so many academic buildings at the time – and even now – walls literally go up around scientific disciplines, meaning science can get trapped in silos of expertise. At the Crick an “open walls” architectural philosophy removes barriers and intentionally encourages multi-disciplinary interaction.

Spearheaded by Sir Richard Treisman, (former Director of CRUKs London Research Institute) working closely with the architects, it’s staircases, interstitial spaces and even its internal walls (which you could write on) were designed to bring people together as they flowed through the building.

Building a scientific legacy

Perhaps the most impressive thing is that after just a decade, it’s clear the Crick already has a scientific legacy. Frankly, the scientific highlights so far are almost too numerous to mention – but a few choice highlights really do show the impact.

CRUK’s flagship lung cancer study, TRACERx (and its follow-on study TRACERx EVO) is being led by Professor Charles Swanton out of the Crick. In April 2023, Crick researchers published a staggering seven papers in Nature and Nature Medicine from the study detailing how non-small cell lung cancer evolves, spreads, and resists treatment. A related finding changed how we think about lung cancer in never-smokers by showing that inflammation linked to air pollution can promote the growth of cells carrying EGFR and KRAS driver mutations in normal lung tissue. This is hugely important as it gives new insight into how environmental exposures can trigger the earliest stages of cancer.

Capitalising on this growing understanding around lung cancer and inflammation, the Swanton lab recently identified a blood protein signature associated with lung cancer risk. It is linked to inflammatory state and incredibly it can be detected more than five years before diagnosis, meaning it could potentially identify people for preventive approaches. And this, I think, really encapsulates the kind of science the Crick has enabled; discipline spanning, creative and with real promise for public health.

That creativity and cross-disciplinary nature is also evident from Leanne Li’s work at the Crick. Arriving in 2020 from MIT, Leanne leads Cancer Grand Challenge Team InteroCANCEption (one of several Cancer Grand Challenges embedded at the Crick) and brings together neuroscientists, immunologists and prosthetics experts across the UK, US, Switzerland and Portugal. Her lab has shown that small-cell lung cancer cells generate their own electrical activity and that this drives aggressiveness and metastasis.

This is a real breakthrough. For the first time we get a glimpse of the mechanisms of the long-observed trait that certain cancers can adopt neuron-like features. Utilising that discovery research and driving towards new therapeutic interventions for highly aggressive cancers is now the ambition for Leanne. And its ambition like this the Crick is so well suited to encourage and support.

Then there’s the modelling work of Vivian Li and her lab. They have managed to generate patient-derived ex-vivo organoids which mimic the structure and function of a human bowel tissue. She uses these 3D ‘mini guts’ to study the effect of Wnt signalling on the development of bowel cancer. This is not only the generation of scientific knowledge, but also a research tool – both of which are set to advance the field in exciting ways.

All of this is, of course, to neglect some of the more established cancer research talent that has made a scientific home at the Crick. From Julian Downward’s RAS–PI3K work in conjunction with Vividion Therapeutics – where he has identified compounds designed to target a previously difficult-to-drug interaction involved in cancer growth – to Karen Vousden’s cancer metabolism work, and Adrian Hayday’s work on immune surveillance and gamma delta T cells. All of them have produced exemplary science and generated insights that have shaped cancer research for decades.

This strength and depth of research talent is reflected in the distinction of the Crick’s scientific community. This includes 4 Nobel Prize winners, 35 Fellows of the Royal Society, 47 Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences, 44 members of EMBO and many other international academies, as well as recipients of some of the world’s most prestigious scientific prizes and honours.

So, ambitious, collaborative work built on the creativity of excellent researchers paired with cutting edge infrastructure and an empowering research culture – that is the ongoing legacy of the Crick. It’s quite something after just a decade. But to deliver on that ambition requires more than just discovery research – it needs to be turned into patient impact.

From bench to bedside

Key to getting exciting science from the lab into a position where it can help patents and the public is an entrepreneurial mindset and expertise. The Crick has been excellent at fostering both. And it’s paying off.

Right from the off, avenues beyond academia were open to researchers. Indeed, just as the Crick opened, Artios Pharma was founded as a Cancer Research Horizons spinout. Established with the founding expertise of Simon Boulton, Crick Associate Research Director and CRUK’s Chief Translation Advisor, Artios is developing treatments based on DNA damage repair mechanisms. The company recently received FDA Fast Track designation for its lead programme and is now launching a global randomised Phase 2 study for patients with BRCA‑mutant HER2‑negative breast cancer.

It’s not the only spinout making waves. Myricx Bio was recently acquired by Novartis for a staggering $1.1bn upfront plus up to $400m in milestone payments. The company is advancing next-generation antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) payloads and was founded on research from Professor Ed Tate’s laboratory at Imperial College London and the Crick.

There are many more – and they underscore how important a translational approach is to progress.

AI, clusters and the next decade

One clear sign that the Crick has made an impression, not only in the biomedical community but in the innovation sector as a whole, is the growth of the Knowledge Quarter.

This is the innovation district set-up around the Crick and includes a rich set of organisations. Perhaps most relevant to the operations of the Crick are Google DeepMind, Boehringer Ingelheim, OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic who all have, or will have, offices in the district. One impact of the prowess of the Crick is to help attract some of the most innovative tech companies in the world – they all cite the concentration of research expertise as a key factor in locating there. Given the huge potential that AI has to accelerate science, it’s exciting to see this growth. It highlights the power of research clusters – excellence attracts; and nowhere has that been more evident in the UK than the growth of the Knowledge Quarter.

It’s also very exciting to see the recent appointment of Mihaela van der Schaar as Chief AI Scientist at the Crick. Alongside her Professorship of Machine Learning, AI, and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, she’ll be exploring the use of AI at the Crick to generate hypotheses, design experiments and uncover disease mechanisms.

This fresh approach has been brought in under the new directorship of Edith Heard. She has a keen appetite to embrace the future, evidenced by the AI and machine learning clinical fellowships at the Crick – funded by CRUK – which train clinicians formally in AI before they apply it to biomedical research.

When it comes to delivering on the promise of AI for cancer research, it’s clear to me that the Crick’s scale and its data – from TRACERx-style longitudinal cohorts to deep mechanistic biology – are vital. Models are only as good as the biology behind them, and the Crick has more of that than almost anywhere in the world.

Let’s not settle, let’s be bold…

By every measure, the Crick has been a success. For science, for innovation and for cancer patients – the Crick has shown us what can be achieved in institutes that give the best people resources, environment and freedom – it’s a statement of how ambitious we can be in the UK.

I was lucky enough to work with Paul Nurse on the first Scientific Planning Committee for the emerging institute, where we pulled a research focus together – merging different research cultures, systems, platforms and approaches.

It was clear from seeing it from the inside how hard creating a research institute on this scale is. It took political leadership, institutional courage and the goodwill of researchers to invest in the ambition. But it’s evident that the payoff is immense – for scientific progress, for young researchers starting out, for UK PLC and of course for patients.

It’s why I would argue we shouldn’t stop at the Crick. We have, and can, attract the talent, as evidenced by our institutes in Glasgow, Manchester and Cambridge as well as the Crick. Locations such as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Oxford can repeat the success we’ve seen. If we want to remain competitive with the US and Asia in the years to come, let the Crick be the beginning of an ambition for the future of UK biomedical research excellence rather than the full stop.