Life Sciences Industrial Strategy (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I too would like to thank the committee for so thoroughly examining this vital part of our economy and national purpose. This is not simply another industry sector. As the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said, the essence of what it brings is clear in its name: life. It is all the more important, therefore, that we as a nation have a clear, simple and credible strategic objective, backed up by the right ways and means to achieve it for our patients as well as our pocketbooks. We need to do this in ways that play to our natural strengths: our science, our NHS and our willingness to work together in times of need. We should not try to become like the Americans or to build companies, however ambitiously large, in the shape of the biotechs of the past. That would fail, not because we do not have enough ambition, but because to succeed and be credible we must be organised and authentic.

We have a strong legacy of leadership in life sciences. Twenty-five of the bestselling drugs ever were discovered here, but most were commercialised by non-UK companies. To reset this imbalance, we need to give industrial help across the board—to UK innovators and progressive charities to translate great science and data into world-class assets. We need to manufacture them here, show their value through early-access patient use in the NHS and then supply the larger firms with healthcare assets that will be sold abroad, not disappear abroad. We must capture the value of the assets we have here, anchor IP here in the UK and return the high value of health data here, to our NHS. I agree entirely with others that we must have the consent of patients in place for this to work.

UK plc is already in competition for this new life sciences industry with other nations richer and more comfortable with risk than we are. The future health service is about innovation with business to better enable prevention and early diagnosis, so we need to realise this now and act now. To enable pharma and tech companies to thrive here, UK plc now needs to act like a life sciences plc would—joined up, commercial and clearly led.

The strategy and the excellent report cover a broad field, but I shall focus on two areas covered in the strategy: first, harnessing the national infrastructure, which gives us our global offering; and secondly, value capture, which is our reward. We have invested billions in public sector infrastructure that can help industry, large and small. We have basic research and specialised equipment held in universities. We have hundreds of biobanks and thousands of opinion leaders in NHS networks wanting to test new innovations in clinical practice. However, we have allowed much of this to be fragmented, internally competitive and tough to navigate from the inside, let alone for industry, as the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, made clear so forcefully. We must create a national industrialised product that our innovators can use and promote globally as a simple, credible, national offering in life sciences. The report says that we need a bus driver, but first we need a navigable bus route, with systems working together as a national unit, each part contributing what it is best at, rather than trying to compete with each other for the same bio-dollar.

There are positives that we must celebrate. We are recruiting patients into clinical trials at unprecedented speeds, and providing ever more research-ready, real-world data for virtual clinical trials to be performed. The strategy created programmes that target translation, prevention and early diagnosis. It also laid the foundations for HDR UK to build industry-available data lakes and included the health catapults as a nurturing ground for UK IP and SMEs. It is therefore pleasing to see an additional five years’ funding announced today for the Medicines Discovery Catapult.

Moving on to value capture, we cannot invest this strategy’s target of 2.4% of our GDP in R&D by 2027 without capturing the value of our health data and IP. No life sciences plc would allow its IP and data to be so distributed and its commercialisation capabilities to be internally competitive and underfunded. The formation of UK Research and Innovation, which combines the research councils with Innovate UK, which grants money to UK innovators, means that we can address this now as part of the strategy.

However, the Commons Public Accounts Committee noted in April this year:

“Currently, ownership of intellectual property resides with the body that conducted the research rather than with the government funder”,


and that:

“Other countries, for example China, actively ensure that the products of university research are protected”.


Surely we should select the life sciences and health to pioneer a national industrial approach to the IP we generate. In a very British way, which the US could never do, UKRI could help form a central IP function to help universities funnel the best IP into national reserves. Imagine the stimulus Innovate UK could then provide to UK SMEs by giving non-cash grants in the form of access to our health data or our national IP. This would be transformational, pioneering and authentically British. Noble Lords will have heard me, the noble Lords, Lord Mitchell and Lord Scriven, and others in this House recommend that a central commercial support system be provided for the NHS and public sector health data controllers so that industry has one place to come, through which the UK can drive the best commercial deals for the nation.

Today, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, have spoken powerfully about, many health-related data and IP deals are being done bilaterally between a large industry eager for data and grateful hospitals with limited commercial skills eager to get through the winter. These show me that optimising the value of data to the nation is an industrial skill that the public sector does not have at scale. The nation will benefit far more from access to commercial skills able to be deployed from a central independent resource, sponsored by government and available across the NHS and public research data sources, with strategic national goals, a range of business models to hand and a sovereign fund to receive a national portion of the proceeds. Let industry-savvy commercial skills deal properly with industry. The returns from these sovereign IP and data assets could deliver untold value to the nation to help deliver the 2.4% target.

To bring this together at a time of intense competition —and the need for speed—needs industrial leadership. I applaud the strategic work of Professor Sir John Bell, the ministerial oversight and drive of the noble Lords, Lord O’Shaughnessy and Lord Henley, and the Office for Life Sciences. However, no life sciences plc which believed in such an ambitious strategy would allow itself to be run without a CEO. Here I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Desai: we need a full-time bus driver. Having no single national owner tells the industry that we have no one driver and allows the national infrastructure to remain fragmented. A full-time industry leader should be appointed immediately, with power over the appropriate budget to harness the national infrastructure, to co-ordinate a national product and to ensure that every step is being taken to capture national value.