Breakthrough, but Faster
We live in an era of just-in-time logistics and near-instant availability of goods and services.
We live in an era of just-in-time logistics and near-instant availability of goods and services. Physical retail shopping, hailing a taxi on the street, even cooking dinner – all of these have become optional in a world where almost everything is now on-demand in a way never seen before. Why should it be any different in the world of life science research? Now researchers across academia and industry can rely on the superfast delivery of the biological research tools necessary to continue their work. Abcam is one of those enablers, providing antibodies, assay kits, and other essential tools to researchers, accompanied with a wealth of accurate data.
Abcam’s success is in many ways a product of an innovative ecosystem that can cultivate and nurture research-related enterprises. Envisaged in 1998 by two Cambridge academics, Jonathan Milner and Tony Kouzarides, as a means of addressing a shortage of research tools of a sufficient quality to study a common and debilitating illness in the UK, breast cancer, Abcam was founded at one side of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc.
Abcam’s early growth was supported by the presence of the capital and mentorship of entrepreneurs like David Cleevely, who provided vital seed-stage funding and expertise as a consultative mentor to the company, and other angel investors within a nurturing and sympathetic research cluster. Abcam is now listed on the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, with a market capitalisation in excess of £3B, and has become one of the most successful life science companies in the world. Today, less than 10% of Abcam’s business is in the UK; the remainder reflects the global distribution of life science research, with ~ 45% in the US, 20% in EMEA, and 20% in China. Abcam’s influence has considerably grown – over half of all life sciences research papers published globally in 2019 cited at least one Abcam product, a truly staggering statistic. In addition, Abcam was recently voted in Glassdoor’s 5 “best places to work in the UK” for the second consecutive year, and recognised as one of “Britain’s most admired companies” by “Management Today”.