G8 Summit on Dementia
Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Sarah Newton(10 years, 12 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. Hon. Members ought to note that if they wish to hear what the Minister and the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman have to say about the debate, they should not take any further interventions.
Sarah Newton
I am a member of the Science and Technology Committee, and I am delighted that my Chairman, the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller), is here and has intervened. I would like to draw the Minister’s attention to some excellent work that our Committee has been doing this year. I think that some of the reports we have published will help him to prepare for the summit. We undertook a very good investigation into clinical trials and also produced a report called “Bridging the valley of death”. Both reports highlighted a very significant issue facing research, not only in the UK but globally.
As Members will know, we have an absolutely world-class science base in our country. The main challenge facing it is to overcome regulatory environments, many of which are international, to enable it to take its first-class research across the valley of death and into the development of ways of diagnosing dementia and therapies for treating it. It is very important to learn the lessons from our very extensive inquiries to enable more of this research to be commercially developed in order to find its way into the marketplace.