In Business news

Follow this topic

Bookmark

Record learning outcomes

Plans to accelerate the discovery of new drugs and “make Britain the best place in the world for medical research” have been announced by the Prime Minister.

The government and the Wellcome Trust are to invest up to £600 million to create a new Health Data Research Service. This, it is claimed, will transform the access to NHS data by providing a secure single access point to national datasets, cutting red tape for researchers.

Clinical trials will also be fast-tracked to accelerate the development of new medicines and therapies, with the aim of cutting the time it takes to get a clinical trial set up to 150 days by March 2026 (data collected in 2022 indicated it was then over 250 days).

This will be achieved by cutting bureaucracy and standardising contracts, so time isn’t wasted on negotiating separate deals across different NHS organisations, says the government.

The new service will be housed at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire, where Wellcome is building a range of new R&D lab and office spaces to expand the current campus’s capacity for innovative genomics and biodata companies.

The announcement has been welcomed by a broad range of research and health bodies, but comes at a time when the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry is warning the government that its drug pricing policies are driving research and investment away from the UK.

The ABPI is warning that “rocketing payment rates under both the Statutory Scheme and the associated Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing, Access and Growth (VPAG), are undermining government efforts to make life sciences a key pillar of its industrial strategy”.

A recent ABPI report says the UK’s “decade of disinvestment in medicines and vaccines has left the NHS lagging international peers in terms of access to and use of innovative treatments”.

The UK has fallen from fourth to tenth place in the global rankings for the number of phase III trials it hosts, below similar European countries like Spain (3rd), Germany (6th) and Italy (7th), the report says. The UK’s share of global R&D investment has fallen from 7.3 to 5.7 per cent over three years, the fastest decline of any European G7 nation.