LifeArc (formerly Medical Research Council Technology / MRC Technology)

We started out as MRC Technology, commercialising scientific research funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), and today we are a leading UK medical research charity. We are self-funding, using our investment portfolio to support our charitable activities. We partner and work with academics, industry, charities and patient groups to unlock the potential of early stage science.

We have an office in London and scientific research facilities in Stevenage and Edinburgh. We also have a specialist science team working at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Our state-of-the-art laboratories in Stevenage are dedicated to drug discovery, while our scientists in Edinburgh are working to develop diagnostics.

Translating science is a long, expensive and unpredictable process. This means many exceptional ideas don’t make it to the patient – they don’t even make it out of the lab. By bridging the gaps in this journey, we help more researchers unlock the potential of their discoveries and ultimately improve patients’ lives.

We seek out early stage discoveries, often in universities, charities and start ups and we aim to develop it to a point where it becomes attractive for others to invest and move it along the innovation pipeline.

LifeArc® is a medical research charity making life science life changing, transforming promising life science ideas into medical breakthroughs that change patients’ lives.

We are self-funding and specialise in early-stage translation – advancing lab-based scientific discoveries to a point at which they can be developed into the next generation of diagnostics, treatments and cures.

We have been doing this for more than 25 years and our work has resulted in a diagnostic for antibiotic resistance and four licensed medicines. This includes Keytruda®(cancer), Actemra® (rheumatoid arthritis), Tysabri® (multiple sclerosis) and Entyvio® (Crohn’s disease) and a test for antimicrobial resistance.

LifeArc is a British life science medical research charity. It was established in 2000 as MRC Technology to translate the work of UK Medical Research Council (MRC) research scientists.

Today, LifeArc provides intellectual property identification, protection and commercialisation, technology development, diagnostic development, early stage drug discovery and antibody humanization services for the MRC, academia, biotechnology and pharmaceutical organisations and charities, aiming to move promising medical research forward into viable and accessible patient treatments. Profits from LifeArc's activities are reinvested into further research.

LifeArc uses funds from royalty payments to provide grants into rare disease research and allocates seed funding to UK companies.