During London’s Life Sciences Week, Ada Ventures and Mills & Reeve convened founders, investors, policymakers, and operators for a conversation on one of the most urgent and overlooked frontiers in innovation: Bio-infrastructure. Moderated by James Foster of Mills & Reeve, the panel brought together Tamsin Berry OBE (Population Health Partners), Alasdair Thong (Alloy Therapeutics), Julia Fan Li PhD (Micrographia Bio), and Check Warner (Ada Ventures).

Their discussion made one thing abundantly clear: in a world where billions will live past 60 and hundreds of millions past 90, our current healthcare systems - built for episodic, reactive care - are no longer fit for purpose. A new category is needed. Enter bio-infrastructure: the tools, systems, policies, and platforms that will underpin global health for the next century.

From DeepTech to deployable infrastructure. 

The term Bio-infrastructure was coined by Ada Ventures because much of what founders were building didn’t fit neatly into existing categories. 

Alasdair - Venture Partner at Ada - explained that historically, biotech value was measured almost exclusively through drug assets, not the platforms producing them. He discussed that deep tech is a bit of an anachronism - although a nice“catch-all”, it suggests a coherent investment pattern where one doesn’t really exist; software has SaaS, traditional life sciences has asset sales… but tech-bio sits between them. 

But with the rise of AI-native discovery, globally distributed R&D, and new forms of data generation, the core value drivers have evolved. We need to reinvent the picks and shovels of drug discovery - using models that treat tools, data engines, and foundational technologies as infrastructure. 

Julia Fan Li, CEO of Micrographia Bio, gave us an anecdote - her team has reimagined the microscope - a 400-year-old instrument - for machine vision instead of human sight. It’s a fundamental platform that accelerates discovery, yet such tools have traditionally been undervalued until a pharma partner or a drug proves their downstream utility.

The panel agreed this is a systemic flaw: pharma partnerships have become overemphasised signals, obscuring the intrinsic value of the platform itself. 

Platforms must prove themselves - companies must be their own best customers.

Another theme was the adoption gap. Pharma is slow. Governments are slower. Investors wait for validation from incumbents who, themselves, are waiting to be convinced. This traps platform companies in a circular dependency.

Ally’s view: bio-infrastructure companies must self-validate. They must run their own programs, generate their own data, and demonstrate value without waiting for external endorsement.

Julia captured this shift succinctly: “Be your own best customer.” Check also noted this pattern across the Ada portfolio: founders in AI-for-science, materials, and synthetic biology are generating assets themselves because industry moves too slowly to adopt new tools.

Companies that create their own proofs will become the early winners and the reference points the ecosystem later follows.

Policy is an enabler of sovereign health systems.

As Ada points out, Bio-infrastructure offers nations a path to build sovereign advantage in health - to democratise access to advanced therapies, and to enable personalised care at scale. Tamsin argued that governments often chase novel science when the real leverage lies in incremental innovation: releasing GP-coded datasets, building national biobanks, enabling distributed clinical trials, lowering the cost of early-stage human data, and acting more like “air-traffic controllers” who guide innovation rather than block it.

She argued that the government should not try to innovate on behalf of industry. Instead, it should build infrastructure that enables innovation at scale - the kind of “one-to-many” assets no single startup can create. Without such systemic investments, breakthrough discoveries risk staying confined to elite labs and wealthy nations. 

Closing the gap in representation.

The panel ended by addressing a foundational issue: the chronic underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities in clinical research. Effective Bio-infrastructure can help correct these inequities through better datasets, more diverse trial sites, federated and synthetic data, and sovereign healthcare partnerships that extend beyond Europe and the US. As Alasdair noted, recent exits such as Serbia’s Dranbuyer (€600M acquisition by Sanofi) demonstrate that high-quality clinical evidence can, and should, come from a wider global base, and must be inclusive by design.

A Call to the Ecosystem

As we look ahead, the panelists’ hopes were ambitious: sovereign partnerships in healthcare, open access to GP-coded data, AI tools that accelerate discovery, and even the emergence of the first trillion-dollar life sciences company.

But Check closed with a challenge: bio-infrastructure should become a shared thesis, embraced not just by Ada Ventures but across the investment landscape. Venture funds must be willing to lead rounds in companies that sit between asset-centric biotech and deep tech - because these are the companies building the very foundations of the future of health.

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