The Campus is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation that exists to improve health, and houses the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the bioinformatics outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and a number of biotech companies whose UK offices are located in the BioData Innovation Centre acting as an incubator for businesses of all sizes.

At the time of its official opening by the Princess Royal in 1994, the Wellcome Genome Campus was already home to the Wellcome Sanger Institute (then called the Sanger Centre), the Medical Research Council’s Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).

[citation needed] The first recorded owner of the estate, in 1506, was the college of Michaelhouse in Cambridge but it wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that the first building – a modest hunting and fishing lodge – was erected by Captain Joseph Richardson of Horseheath.

[citation needed] In 2000, the first draft of the human genome was announced with the Sanger Centre championing open access to the data and making the largest contribution to the global collaborative endeavour.

The subsequently renamed Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute established long term research programmes to explore and apply genome sequences.