How The BioChain Is Built: Oxford, Ghent, and What Comes Next

A question we get asked often, by investors, collaborators and prospective hires alike, is deceptively simple: where actually is The BioChain? The honest answer is that we are not building this company around a single postcode. We are building it around the shape of the problem we are solving, and that shape is deliberately spread across more than one city.

It is worth setting out why, because the model is intentional rather than accidental, and because it explains decisions we expect to make over the coming months.

Oxford: where the company is anchored

Oxford remains our head office and the centre of gravity for the company: strategy, leadership, partnerships and the scientific thinking that underpins the product all sit here. Oxford gives us proximity to a deep bench of academic expertise in genomics, infectious disease and computational biology, and it is where the founding scientific case for The BioChain, set out in Who Owns the Evidence Chain? and the Minimum Evidence Record, was first developed. That does not change.

Ghent: where the software gets built

Earlier this year we opened our Ghent office, and it has quickly become the engineering centre of The BioChain. Belgium, and Ghent specifically, sits inside a genuinely strong European software and bioinformatics talent pool, with close ties to the region’s life-sciences and agri-tech industry, and it places us closer to European research infrastructure and regulatory thinking as we build for an international customer base. Practically speaking, Ghent is where the platform gets written: the pipelines, the data infrastructure, and the tooling that turns our provenance model into something researchers can actually use day to day.

Splitting head office and engineering deliberately keeps the scientific case-for-being and the software that expresses it in permanent conversation with each other, without asking one city, or one team, to do both jobs at once.

The piece we are still building

Oxford and Ghent cover strategy and software. What they do not fully cover is proximity to the applied, day-to-day science our platform is meant to serve: outbreak investigation, genomic surveillance, veterinary epidemiology, One Health research, the kind of work we describe in Sequencing Is the Beginning, Not the End and At the Wildlife-Livestock Boundary, Genomic Data Needs a Provenance Trail.

That is a gap we are actively working to close, and we are already in conversation about a third base, one built specifically around scientific partnership rather than head-office functions or software engineering. The strongest candidate on the table is Liverpool. The city’s concentration of infectious disease, veterinary science and global health research, much of it within a short walk of itself in the Knowledge Quarter, makes it an unusually good fit for the kind of collaborative, applied work our platform needs to be tested against. Nothing is signed yet, but it is where our attention is, and we expect to have more to say on this within the next few weeks.

Why this shape, and not one office

We could, in principle, have built The BioChain as a single office doing everything. We chose not to, because the problem we are solving does not live in one place. Scientific evidence is generated by distributed teams, using distributed infrastructure, interpreted by distributed communities of researchers, a reality we set out at length in the Evidence Chain piece. A company trying to preserve the integrity of that evidence probably should not pretend it can be built from a single desk either. Our own structure, headquarters, engineering and scientific partnership in three different places, is, in a small way, a reflection of the same distributed reality we are building infrastructure to serve.

It is also, we think, simply a better way to build the company. Oxford keeps us honest about the science. Ghent keeps us honest about the engineering. And wherever our third hub lands, it will keep us honest about whether any of this actually works in the hands of the researchers who need it, a discipline we are already applying through demonstrators like Ancient BioChain.

More to come soon.