Initiative aims to make London Europe’s commercial centre for life sciences

The mayor of London has launched a new initiative, designed to make the city pre-eminent in the commercialisation of the life sciences, not only in the United Kingdom but in Europe. Called MedCity, it will bring together the expertise of Imperial, University, and King’s colleges of the University of London with Oxford and Cambridge universities to create a “golden triangle” to help turn developments in bioscience into companies and jobs.

The mayor, Boris Johnson, never one to shy away from a historical analogy, compared the initiative to the coming together of the “virtuosi” who launched the scientific revolution in London in the 17th century, meeting in coffee shops and setting up the Royal Society. In recent years, he argued at a launch at Imperial College’s Hammersmith campus, London had not been as successful as some …