A recent report stated that the UK’s life sciences sector is falling behind international competitors, missing out on an estimated £15 billion a year over the past decade due to declining foreign investment, falling export share and a drop in clinical trials (read more here).
LightOx CEO, Dr Sam Whitehouse, responds to the findings and shares his thoughts on how we can close the investment gap.
I welcome this report, which was commissioned by the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI). It states that while the life sciences sector has been identified as a priority by government for its potential to drive economic growth, we have still fallen behind our international competitors.
The report highlights that life sciences contributes around £34 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the UK economy and supports more than 300,000 jobs across the country and yet clinical trials initiated in the UK have decreased by 8% since 2017/18 – where the report puts down to slow regulatory timelines, poor recruitment and high costs here in the UK. Another factor being the less competitive R&D tax-credits for clinical research when compared to other countries, with Australia now taking the lead for initiating new trials due to their rebate mechanisms.
Increasing clinical trials in the UK
When a company is choosing where to hold its clinical trials, they will naturally look at incentives offered by governments. Are the tax incentives more attractive in Australia? France? Or the UK?
Of course, in the UK we have R&D tax credits still which are most welcome and cover a broad scope of what is R&D. However, should work like clinical trials be prioritised above other R&D for incentives?
Should we also be looking to make it more attractive for international businesses to carry out clinical trials in the UK? It would give us access to new medicines and brings in investment which in turn supports job creation and leads to more R&D being done here in the UK.
Bringing together businesses across a wider sector
The BIA are great at highlighting these schemes to government on clinical trials, but science and R&D is a broad church. Organisations like NEPIC – the North East Process Industry Cluster – bring together companies operating in areas from petrochemicals and food to pharmaceuticals. These are R&D intensive companies but also, they produce products of the future, and this leads to manufacturing on a large scale, and what they have a lot in common is the need for highly paid skilled personnel to handle these processes involved. Often the skills of STEM based subject areas taught in our institutions leads to research work that can be very similar in their manner while the outputs to industrial usage are very different.
NEPIC, the BIA, Bionow, OBN and other membership groups create meaningful business relationships across sectors, and this can be an important way of attracting more investment and innovation and highlighting the work within the sectors that they work within, but they rarely cover all aspects of innovation and translation across the sectors. Innovation is a transferable skill within itself and stimulation from one sector may well influence another. We often talk about AI in this regard, but there is so much more if we provide the opportunities to translate, and the investment to let businesses grow and innovate with their peers.
It also makes the sector more attractive for skilled workers. For example, graduate scientists leaving university often move into one industry, but can we make it easier for them to see and move between multiple sectors which use the same skill sets? In the past I took engineers from the oil and gas industry and applied the skills into microfluidics for diagnostics. Macro fluid flow to micro fluid low is a mindset change, a challenge that involves many, many, interactions with engineers, chemists and process skills, but the outputs are different, not the skills.
I think these are connections, which can be missed, can give us an advantage when talking with investors, and showing the diversity of businesses in the region and why we are highly skilled in UK industries.
Investment imbalance within the UK
Of course, there is also the question of the known imbalance in funding and research within the UK itself, and whether this is damaging to our international prospects. This is something I spoke with Newcastle MP, Chi Onwurah, Chair of the Science and Innovation Committee for our government when we met at a recent BIA event this month in Newcastle.
There’s a historical bias towards London, Oxford and Cambridge in terms of research investment, and in the past it may have made sense to continue funding what has been shown to work and the outputs that these institutions have given us.
But now we have to ask, is this still the best way to spend our limited resource? And would the same work receive the same funding if it was happening elsewhere in the country?
If the UK is to compete successfully with its global rivals, we must make sure that research and manufacturing is funded in the most effective way across all our regions, and that we are supported in attracting investment into all of our businesses, not just those in the South.
Wouldn’t it be nice to not just have a golden triangle, but maybe a golden dodecahedron?
LightOx is currently developing a light-activated oral cancer treatment which is going through clinical trials in the UK. Find out more.
