Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to support collaboration between NHS researchers, academia, and wider industry in the development of innovative medical treatments.

Technological innovation is central to achieving the Government’s ambitions to build a health and social care system fit for the future, and to shorten the amount of time people spend in poor health.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is continuing to enable system-wide collaboration by creating integrated frameworks that bring together National Health Service organisations, academia, and industry throughout the innovation lifecycle. This includes through United Kingdom wide access pathways such as the Innovative Licensing and Access Pathway and the Innovative Devices Access Pathway, which concluded in March 2025. These pathways provide developers with an integrated platform for sustained engagement with regulators, UK Health Technology Assessment bodies, and the NHS.

The MHRA has published a statement of policy intent for developing and implementing an Early Access Service for innovative medical devices. The service is intended to accelerate safe patient access to innovative devices, supporting the Government’s ambitions in the Life Sciences Sector Plan. The MHRA also offers early-stage regulatory engagement through its Innovation Office and Innovation Accelerator function.

The NIHR, the Department’s research arm, is strengthening commercial research through the NIHR Industry Hub and by implementing recommendations from the NIHR Industry Engagement and Delivery Review. These measures are creating a more coherent, connected and responsive system for collaboration with industry. This includes unifying approaches to industry engagement across the NIHR, embedding consistent metrics for delivery performance, streamlining costing and contracting processes, and developing tailored support for small to medium enterprises to ensure that innovative biotech and medtech companies can access the UK’s research infrastructure effectively.

The NIHR’s Innovation Catalyst is designed to accelerate late-stage, high-impact innovations, linking NHS need, economic growth, and commercialisation. It will support real-world evaluation and readiness for NHS adoption of innovative treatments. Together, these measures position the UK to deliver commercial trials faster and improve access to innovation treatments, more transparently, and at global scale.

The Government is committed to turbocharging clinical research and delivering better patient care, to make the UK a world-leading destination for clinical research. We are working to fast-track clinical trials and have committed to cutting the current time it takes to get a clinical trial set up to under 150 days, to drive global investment into life sciences, improve health outcomes, and accelerate the development of medicines and therapies of the future.