Based on the University of East Anglia's campus and the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, the cluster is made up of four research institutes - the John Innes Centre, Quadram Institute, Earlham Institute and Sainsbury Laboratory.

And it is now home to around 50 companies and more than 3,000 early-career researchers.

Norwich Research Park is one of the region's largest employers, home to 50 companies (Image: News Quest) This means it is one of the region’s largest employers, with research focussing on three key areas which it calls HP3: healthy plants, people and planet.

Now, armed with more than one million sq ft of planning consent, the research park continues to grow, with work under way to build new laboratories and office space to attract more companies and award-winning scientists to the region.

But while comparisons are often made between Norwich Research Park and Cambridge, the university city has never been its competition.

Roz Bird, chief executive of Anglia Innovation Partnership, which is the campus management organisation at Norwich Research Park, says the park is different to Cambridge, specialising in plant-based science rather than traditional drug discovery.

Roz Bird, CEO of Anglia Innovation Partnership, the campus management organisation at Norwich Research Park (Image: Supplied) Miss Bird, who became chief executive three years ago, said: “Cambridge is fully focussed on traditional drug discovery using petri-chemicals to make complex compounds that are needed to save people with diseases in hospitals.

“Whereas what we are doing on the human health side is preventing people from getting those diseases in the first place and needing to go to hospital.

"For example, the work our scientists are doing at the John Innes Centre is looking at how we can make drugs for people with diseases using plants.”

Roz Bird, CEO of Anglia Innovation Partnership, the campus management organisation at Norwich Research Park (Image: Supplied) Norwich Research Park’s competition instead comes from across the Channel at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which focusses on "healthy food and living environment".

But despite Miss Bird admitting that the Dutch university is “years ahead” of Norwich Research Park, she said being based in Norfolk has its advantages with UK precision breeding laws enabling areas of research which cannot be conducted at campuses located elsewhere in Europe.

“The precision breeding act and the enabling legislation in March means looking at DNA structures of plants and snipping and removing certain traits which would take 10 years to do via breeding can now be done in just two weeks in a lab,” she added.

“Gene editing is different from genetically modified food. It is editing genes in a way a plant could do itself through breeding - it is selective breeding, or speed breeding.

"The speed breeding bill [the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act] allows it to be commercialised.

Roz Bird, CEO of Anglia Innovation Partnership, the campus management organisation at Norwich Research Park (Image: Chris Ball Photography) “People will soon be able to buy gene edited bananas on the shelves of supermarkets in England which they couldn’t do before. You can’t do that in Europe, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland – only in England.

"That has brought us a competitive advantage over Wageningen because you can’t do that in the Netherlands.”

Tropic, based at Norwich Research Park, has developed a variant of Cavendish banana that stays fresh for longer (Image: Tropic) There are over 150 science parks in the UK, but only five are Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) funded research and innovation campuses.

Norwich Research Park is one of them, which means it receives government funding for its strategic research.

The campus is also home to three BBSRC-funded research institutes: the Quadram Institute, John Innes Centre........

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