Research & Development at UCB - a home for innovation

At UCB, innovation goes into the medicines we discover, develop, and deliver. To achieve this, we work hard at providing the right surroundings and facilities, creating a culture that nurtures and fosters innovation, hiring great people and looking beyond our own boundaries to acquire new knowledge and skills.

We are passionate about building a home for innovation, an exciting place for creative minds and people determined to innovate, push beyond the boundaries of what’s possible and shape the future. After all we are an R&D company and R&D is all about the future.

R&D Locations

We have world class discovery, research, development and manufacturing facilities, and consistently re-invest more than a quarter of our revenue back into R&D. this makes us one of the most research-intensive and agile biopharma companies in Europe. Our state-of-the-art facilities consist of; 3 strategic research centers, 3 research satellites, 4 manufacturing sites and 7 development sites. These are spread globally - across 6 countries and employ over 1,700 researchers.

  • Belgium – Braine-L’Alleud & Leuven

    Belgium – Braine-L’Alleud & Leuven

    Our Braine-L’Alleud site is one of our key strategic research centers. Based just outside Brussels in Belgium, it is a hub for UCB’s manufacturing, research and development expertise, particularly with regards to biology and chemistry.

    The Leuven site is home to one of our research satellites centres and here our focus is on the discovery and development of in vivo gene therapy through adeno-associated virus (AAV) capsid technology.

  • China – Shanghai

    China – Shanghai

    At our Shanghai site is a team that focuses on clinical development of new medicines that address unmet needs of patients on Asia and globally.

  • Germany – Monheim

    Germany – Monheim

    Based between Cologne and Dusseldorf, the Monheim campus houses a global clinical development team who are responsible for the end-to-end delivery of clinical studies from protocol concept to data interpretation to the final study report.

  • Japan – Saitama & Tokyo

    Japan – Saitama & Tokyo

    At our Tokyo site we have a global clinical development team with expertise in clinical study strategy and design and the analysis and interpretation of study data.

    Saitama is one of our speciality manufacturing sites that focuses on oral forms manufacturing and packaging operations for their local market.

  • Switzerland – Bulle

    Switzerland – Bulle

    Bulle is home to one of our state-of-the-art production facilities. Few companies around the world bring together both biotechnology and chemical platforms on a single production site but at Bulle we have dual expertise of biological production based on antibodies and the production of small molecules obtained by chemical processes.

  • U.S – Boston, Durham, Seattle & Raleigh

    U.S – Boston, Durham, Seattle & Raleigh

    Established in 2017, UCB’s Boston key strategic research center now has more than 125 people driving our work in areas including targeted protein degradation, protein biochemistry, and structural biology to help us discover new medicines for treating patient populations with severe neurodegenerative and immunological diseases.

    Additional sites include global clinical development in Raleigh and research satellites in Durham and Seattle with expertise in molecular biology, biophysics, viral vector molecular design, structural biology/X-ray crystallography, genomics and epigenomics.

  • UK – Slough & Kings College London

    UK – Slough & Kings College London

    In 2004 UCB acquired the British biotechnology company Celltech. Today the Slough site is a key strategic research center and home to UCB’s immunology research teams and a variety of development functions.

    The research satellite Hub based at King’s College London was set up in February 2019 and is a collaboration that sees UCB researchers working directly alongside academics with a focus on early focus on early development and translational medicine.

What does innovation mean to our researchers?

What is innovation? How does UCB approach innovation? What is UCB’s innovation culture? Innovation is at the centre of everything our R&D colleagues do at UCB, but how we innovate is as unique as our employees and for this reason we asked our researchers to share with you what innovation means to them. So let us show that innovation is a philosophy that’s embedded in everything we do.

Learn more about innovation

Funding

At UCB we are committed to improving patients' lives and advancing scientific research and medical knowledge. We support a variety of initiatives through our external funding programmes, including Investigator-Initiated Studies, Grants, Donations, and Sponsorships.  

All completed requests that meet our review criteria and are submitted with sufficient notice will be reviewed and considered for support. However, UCB receives numerous proposals and is unable to support every request.

Discover our R&D Career opportunities

Join us in shaping the future of healthcare - explore our R&D opportunities and be part of our innovative team.

Apply here