LIVERPOOL’S biocampus could become a “Silicon Valley” for the life sciences sector – that’s the ambitious aim of the team behind the project.

The scheme is being driven by a partnership between the Royal Liverpool Hospital, the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

The campus will sit alongside the planned new £451m Royal and will bring together the expertise of medics, academics and biotech companies in a regenerated city centre location that could house thousands of skilled workers.

Tony Bell, chief executive of the Royal, said: “The key to successful knowledge economies is being able to connect academic and specialist research assets to emerging technologies that have major market potential, which is the Silicon Valley model and it’s something the biocampus has been designed to emulate.”

The biocampus will take years to complete – but work on its first building, the Liverpool BioInnovation Centre, could start within a year.

The five-storey centre at the junction of Prescot Road and Daulby Street will include 70,000 sq ft of laboratory space for growing pharmaceutical firms.

If it wins planning permission, the centre could open in 2014 – and Redx Pharma, which could by then have more than 100 staff, will then move in. The centre will solve one problem facing the city’s biotech sector – a lack of space in which to grow.