H.I.G. Realty Barts Health unveil Cavell Street life sciences hub

H.I.G. Capital and the Barts Health NHS Trust have agreed to develop the first major building within the new Barts Life Sciences Cluster — a purpose-built applied healthcare innovation campus at Cavell Street in Whitechapel. The project will deliver a campus-grade facility designed to embed industry-led R&D next to active clinical services and aims to accelerate the route from prototype to patient.

The development will be led by H.I.G. Realty, the real estate arm of the global alternative asset manager with approximately $74 billion in assets under management. The Cavell Street scheme spans about 170,000 sq ft and is intended as a high-spec laboratory and demonstration environment where MedTech, digital health and AI-enabled healthcare companies can co-develop and validate solutions in live NHS settings.

Under the partnership model, private-sector tenants will have structured access to clinicians and research teams from Barts Health NHS Trust, including staff at The Royal London Hospital. The Cluster is supported by existing and planned facilities at Queen Mary University of London, aiming to create a concentrated innovation ecosystem in East London that pairs clinical throughput with commercial capability.

Shane DeGaris, Group CEO of Barts Health NHS Trust, said the scheme will reconfigure how the NHS and industry collaborate: by providing places where products can be iterated in clinical workflows rather than in isolated labs. Jérôme Fouillé, Managing Director at H.I.G. Realty in Europe, described Cavell Street as a platform for multinational and local firms to test and scale patient-focused technologies with frontline NHS teams.

Market context underlines the rationale. Demand for lab-ready, clinical-adjacent space has outpaced supply across the UK life sciences market, and institutional capital has increasingly targeted specialist real estate that supports translational research and early-stage clinical validation. Embedding testbeds inside an NHS trust reduces the lead time to regulatory and clinical feedback — a competitive edge for developers and tenants focused on rapid commercialisation.

For East London the implications are twofold: a boost in high-value jobs and the prospect of local economic spillovers as start-ups, spinouts and global corporates take tenancy. The Cavell Street project signals how private capital and public health bodies can structure long-term partnerships to bridge the commercialisation gap for technologies ranging from advanced MedTech to clinical AI.