Brex­it who? Record in­vest­ment last year fu­els big spike in reg­is­tered UK biotech firms

LON­DON — Af­ter Britain nar­row­ly signed up to leave the Eu­ro­pean Union in June 2016, the prog­no­sis for in­dus­try was pro­ject­ed to be grim. A new analy­sis sug­gests that UK biotech has es­caped that noose — and in­deed flour­ished — over the pe­ri­od that the di­vorce terms were meant to be for­mu­lat­ed.

By an­a­lyz­ing da­ta from the Com­pa­nies House reg­is­ter — a place where in­for­ma­tion about firms reg­is­tered in the UK is made pub­licly avail­able by the gov­ern­ment —  Lon­don-based in­vest­ment man­ag­er Down­ing found that 3,456 ac­tive com­pa­nies are cur­rent­ly in­volved in biotech­nol­o­gy R&D ac­tiv­i­ties, a stag­ger­ing 65% in­crease from 2,095 such firms in the first quar­ter of 2016.

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