In a diagnostics or biotech business, the product is ultimately trust in the data: a result a clinician, a sponsor or a regulator can rely on, with an auditable trail standing behind it. That is also where the operational pain sits. The data that has to be defensible is usually scattered across lab instruments, a LIMS, a quality system and a layer of spreadsheets that were never meant to hold regulated records. On Manchester’s Oxford Road Corridor, the only place in the UK where a major research university, a metropolitan university and a large NHS foundation trust sit within a five-minute walk, that tension is the everyday reality for a dense cluster of science firms.
The cluster is concrete and growing. Manchester Science Park houses around 150 science and tech businesses, and the CityLabs campus on the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust site has become a genomics and precision-medicine hub. QIAGEN runs its European Center of Excellence for Precision Medicine from CityLabs 2.0, molecular-diagnostics group Yourgene Health occupies the whole of Skelton House, and biomarker firm APIS Assay Technologies sits in CityLabs 1.0 alongside the Manchester Centre for Genomic Medicine. Bruntwood SciTech’s £42m CityLabs 4.0 adds containment-level labs from 2025.
A clarification on who this serves. The pure digital-health and bioinformatics firms here build their own software and are not our clients. The buyers are the regulated operations: the diagnostics, biotech and medtech businesses whose science is the product and whose systems are an afterthought they no longer have time for.
Where Lab and Research Data Fragments
For these firms the problem is rarely a single bad system. It is that the trail a regulated result depends on runs through tools that do not connect:
- Instruments and the LIMS don’t fully join. Analysers and sequencers produce data that gets exported, reformatted and re-entered, breaking the clean sample-to-result chain a LIMS such as LabWare or STARLIMS is supposed to hold.
- Sample and inventory tracking lives partly in the LIMS and partly in spreadsheets, so chain-of-custody and reagent lots are reconstructed by hand.
- The quality and document system (SOPs, training records, deviations) sits apart from the operational data, so demonstrating GxP or ISO compliance in an audit means assembling evidence across systems.
- Reporting to sponsors, the NHS or regulators is a manual export-and-format exercise, repeated each cycle, each one a chance for the version that ships to drift from the source.
In a regulated lab, those gaps are more than inefficiency. Each manual hop is a point where data integrity can be questioned, and data integrity is the whole proposition.
What We Build Around the Lab
The work is the operational and integration layer around regulated science, never the diagnostic algorithms or the science itself:
- Integrations connecting instruments, the LIMS or ELN (such as Benchling), the quality system and finance, so sample, result and inventory data flow once with the audit trail intact. This is our core API integration work.
- Sample and inventory tracking with proper chain-of-custody, built to the way the lab actually runs.
- Audit-ready reporting and dashboards that assemble sponsor, NHS and regulatory output from source data automatically, with traceability built in.
- Bespoke operational applications covering research-ops, clinical-ops or production workflows, built as custom software where the off-the-shelf scientific tools leave gaps, with validation and compliance in mind.
On the Oxford Road Corridor?
If proving where a result came from means stitching together exports from an instrument, a LIMS and three spreadsheets, that fragility is worth designing out before an audit finds it. Tell us how a sample moves from receipt to reported result in your lab and we will map where the trail breaks and what would close it. The life-sciences corridor is one strand of our Manchester work.
