Case Study

Integrated drug discovery CRO Domainex first moved into Howard Group’s Unity Campus innovation district in January 2022, taking 7,000 sq ft of laboratory space to provide a dedicated facility for its biology department.

Since then, the multi award-winning company has achieved record UK revenues and seen a 50% growth in headcount in the last 12 months.

Long recognised as one of the UK’s foremost providers of drug discovery services, Domainex has ambitious plans to build further upon this success and double its revenue over the next three years.

To accommodate this year’s impressive performance and to enable future growth, Domainex needed to significantly increase its real estate footprint.

The company is now expanding its facilities by leasing one of three new fully fitted laboratory buildings at Unity Campus. The state-of-the-art 24,000 sq ft three-storey Building A2 (Sigma Building), designed to facilitate a 60/40 wet lab/office split, is on track to achieve BREEAM ‘Excellent’, an EPC rating of ‘B’ and will be WELL enabled with a defined embodied carbon target of <750kgCO2e/m2.

As one of Cambridge’s longest established and most respected life science companies, we asked Domainex COO, David Cronk, why they made the decision to continue their growth journey at Unity Campus.

“There is a definite sense of conversation and cooperation; between individuals and between the various companies based here,” said David. “There’s the day-to-day social interaction in terms of people just mingling and then there’s also regular commercial interaction as well.

“The difference comes when, even if it’s not necessarily a business interaction, there’s a high level of practical support and a sharing of knowledge and information. In my experience, this is difficult to achieve so effectively.

“We not only have clients amongst the Unity Campus community, we have a troupe of approachable companies here who are willing to lend a hand to one-another.

“If our fellow business occupiers are off site, we’ll take any deliveries of equipment for example and vice versa. Or if I need to find an office furniture supplier and want a recommendation, I’ll happily speak to my equivalent from other companies on Campus and see who they’ve used.

“Another great example is a package of work with Chester Zoo under our CSR umbrella. We were connected to the team at Chester Zoo by Jeanette Walker, former Unity Campus Director, to see if we could establish a diagnostic test for some of their animals. We reached out to our Campus neighbours Biocair for help and advice on shipping samples from the zoo and they kindly shipped samples from Chester to us free of charge. That kind of responsive interaction is wonderfully common. I think it’s a willingness to accept that perhaps we don’t all hold the key or have all the answers but we can work together to find a solution.”