AZ Chief Scientist Wants Britain To Be Like Boston
Executive Summary
A UK Government report is spelling out an achievable vision for the country's life sciences sector which will create an internationally competitive eco-system.
The pharmaceutical industry has responded positively to the publication of the UK Government's wide-ranging Life Sciences Industrial Strategy report, which sets out concrete proposals to boost a sector that consists of 5,000 companies, 235,000 employees and produced turnover of £64bn last year.
The report was unveiled at the University of Birmingham by Sir John Bell, Regius Chair of Medicine at the University of Oxford, with the ambitious goal of "putting the UK in a world-leading position to take advantage of the health technology trends of the next 20 years." He said that "we have created a strategy which capitalizes on our strong science base to further build the industry into a globally-unique and internationally competitive life sciences eco-system, supported by collaboration across industry, government, the NHS, academia, and research funders to deliver health and wealth."
Sir John's report brings together input and recommendations from a broad range of stakeholders, including pharmaceutical majors, such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck Sharp & Dohme Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline PLC and AstraZeneca PLC. In an interview with Scrip, Mene Pangalos, the latter's head of innovative medicines and early development biotech unit and global business development, said AstraZeneca has been very involved, with chief executive Pascal Soriot on the board and Pangalos having several meetings with Sir John "to flesh it out."
He added that "it is nice to see a coherent plan that brings all of the components of the life sciences together to create a visionary and exciting strategy that will drive growth and prosperity in the UK in the future."
One of the elements of particular interest in the report is a recommendation for the establishment of the Healthcare Advanced Research Program (HARP), through which industries, charities and the NHS can collaborate on ambitious and long-term UK-based projects. This would involve a coalition of funders "to undertake large research infrastructure projects and high-risk ‘moonshot programs’, that will help create entirely new industries in healthcare," the report states.
Some of them "should be large-scale infrastructure projects that have historically put the UK in globally leading positions in areas such as precision medicine and genomics," the report says, referencing UK Biobank and Genomics England (GeL) as two existing examples of such programs. However, "there is a need to consider other such possibilities," such as creating a platform for developing effective diagnostics for early, asymptomatic chronic disease, using digitization and artificial intelligence to transform pathology and imaging and projects looking at healthy ageing.
HARP Could Be UK's DARPA
Pangalos told Scrip that HARP could be "the DARPA of health in the UK," referring to the US Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which is responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military." He noted that DARPA has been very successful in taking innovation and applying it, and to tackle moonshots in healthcare, it is vital to bring together stakeholders - pharma, biotech, academia and the NHS.
It would be a "separate stream of work funded with a vision that will hopefully deliver new technologies and new companies that will be made in Britain and stay in Britain," he said. In addition to having a system where existing pharma and biotech groups can thrive, "we need to create fledging companies that grow into companies that can be worth tens of millions, hundreds of millions and ultimately billions of dollars that stay in the UK and don't move to the US."
This new ecosystem will need "an NHS that is fully entwined in innovation, and adoption of innovation from translational science and medicine," Pangalos said. This requires "significant investment on all fronts," he added, noting that though the £160m initial cash boost that the Government announced at the launch of the report is very encouraging, "to execute and implement the life sciences strategy will need a lot more than that."
Pangalos said he is looking forward to see new companies "growing into the new AstraZenecas and GSKs" but warned that conditions need to change in order for the most promising start-ups to stay in the UK and not head off across the Atlantic and list on the Nasdaq. "We haven't got the same 'patient capital' as in the US - in Boston, it has the financial, scientific, pharma and biotech environment - you need all of those things and we have to build that here."
'Punching Above Our Weight'
He went on to say that "we do have some of those things, we have a great science base, we punch above our weight, we have some of the top universities in the world and a unique thing we do have is the NHS. However, we have to capitalize on that strong academic base and translate that into the application of innovation."
There was also enthusiasm for the report from other big pharma players. Phil Thomson, president of global affairs at GSK, said "the UK is a powerhouse for life sciences" and the company welcomes the vision set out by Sir John for the sector’s future. He added that at the core of this new industrial strategy "is a stronger and deeper level of collaboration between industry, government, the NHS, academia and funders. Working together, we can make the UK internationally competitive in life sciences for the long-term, capitalizing on the country’s world-class science base and realizing innovation to drive economic growth and improve patient care."
Equally enthusiastic was Mike Thompson, chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. He said the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy "is an impressive document which captures the importance of our sector to a successful post-Brexit Britain," adding that Sir John "is to be congratulated in pulling together a complex and diverse sector and showing the benefits to the UK of getting us all to align."
Thomson stated that "the NHS is rightly at the heart of the strategy - if it can build on its unique capability to use health data in research and development and address the UK’s long-standing challenge of adopting new treatments, it will create a virtuous circle for all and deliver massive health and economic benefits to the UK."