The following is an excerpt from The Economist:
Two of the world’s most innovative cities have the same name and completely opposite problems. That is leading to closer collaboration
Whereas Britain’s Cambridge is starved of capital and space, its American twin has been distorted by excess. During the covid-19 pandemic, companies began to have initial public offerings “way too early… often without proof of concept”, explains Kendalle Burlin O’Connell of MassBio, a trade body. Between 2020 and 2024, the amount of commercial lab space in Greater Boston almost doubled, from 35m to 63m square feet. Rents, overhead costs and salary expectations all soared.
When the downturn inevitably came, the city was left with indigestion. In the fourth quarter of 2025, 28% of lab space was vacant in Boston-Cambridge. As the cranes halted, so did the funding. The number of biotech initial public offerings in Massachusetts fell from 15-25 a year to one or two, says Ms Burlin O’Connell. Investors became more risk-averse, giving larger amounts to fewer firms, but starving earlier-stage companies of capital—the reverse of the British problem.
Increasingly, the two Cambridges’ strengths and weaknesses seem to complement one another. The two have always collaborated: an annual conference on “Accelerating Bio-Innovation” alternates between the University of Cambridge and MIT. A growing trend, notes Mike Anstey of Cambridge Innovation Capital, a vc firm, is for British biotech firms to be in both. Bicycle Therapeutics, which listed on the Nasdaq in 2019, is one of dozens that have opened an office in Massachusetts, while keeping its core research and development at home. The former offers access to America’s larger pools of capital and talent, clinical-trial capacity and its domestic market; the latter, world-class talent on the cheap. Deep-tech startups often do the same, notes Mr Anstey, but with San Francisco instead.
