Life sciences companies keep gravitating toward cities built around major research universities, and the reasons go beyond convenience. Lab space, foot traffic between campus and company, and a reliable pipeline of graduate researchers shape where a biotech or pharma company puts its next site. The pattern holds across very different countries, and the logic behind it says a lot about how this industry operates day to day.
How this plays out across different countries
Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts remain the clearest example, with Harvard and MIT a short walk from some of the biggest names in the industry, but the same pattern holds well beyond New England. San Diego built its cluster around UC San Diego and the Salk Institute, while Basel grew its reputation on a major university and pharmaceutical employers already in the city. Cambridge, England, works the same way on a smaller scale, and much of the office space Cambridge offers in its central business district is fully serviced, letting an overseas advance team get a desk and meeting room sorted within days rather than months while the lease is worked out.
What proximity to a university actually provides
Access to faculty labs and equipment is only part of the draw. A company near a strong research university can hire postdocs and graduate students without asking them to relocate, and bring in a professor as a part-time advisor without adding to the commute. Spinout companies also keep close ties with the labs that produced them, drawing on former colleagues for hires and informal review of data. One Basel biotech that grew out of the University of Basel’s Biozentrum keeps hiring from local microbiology departments as it scales, a pattern that repeats wherever a strong university anchors a cluster.
The real estate side of the equation
Lab space is expensive to build and hard to retrofit from a standard office floor, so life sciences firms often cluster into the same buildings rather than spreading out. Ventilation, waste handling and floor loading need designing in from the start, so a building with that infrastructure fills fast and holds its rent for as long as demand lasts. Lab and R&D inventory in the United States has grown from roughly 171 million to 239 million square feet since 2021, hard to justify without a constant stream of companies spinning out of nearby universities. That growth is now beginning to stabilise, though asking rents are still slipping, particularly in the most heavily supplied markets.
What this means when choosing a location
A company weighing where to put its next lab rarely picks a city for its skyline or cost of living alone. The strength of the local university and whether the real estate market has room for specialised lab space carry more weight than incentives or headline rent. Firms that choose on price alone often find themselves flying in talent that could have been hired locally, or waiting months for a landlord to retrofit space a university-anchored building would already have ready.
The clusters that keep growing are rarely the newest or the cheapest. They tend to be the ones where a university keeps producing people and ideas a company nearby can use.
