The policy backdrop to providing support – in particular finance – for the life sciences sector was the topic of debate for a high-powered plenary session at the UKSPA 40th anniversary conference at Warwick University.
The first speaker was Irene Graham, Founder and CEO of the ScaleUp Institute, founded in 2015 to address the challenge for UK businesses in scaling up.
She said: “The OECD placed us third in the world for starting a business in 2013 but 13th in the world for scaling a business.
“It’s important we get that right because when we look at our SME population of around 5.5 million that brought £2.4 trillion into the UK economy, 34,000 of those are driving over 55% of that turnover.
“There are scaleups that are growing at 20% and the life sciences sector is one of the fastest growing sectors within that scale-up economy.
“Our scaleups in that economy are telling us they’ve got some very particular challenges; firstly access to markets, to talent, and access to capital finance to scale.
“When you look at some of the investment dynamics, we’ve got great angel investors around the country, particularly in the Cambridge and Oxford triangle, but what you’re finding is that a lot of the follo- on funding is coming from overseas. That’s not all a bad thing but it does mean that we’re tending to have not enough follow-on capital through the cycle for our scaling businesses that is UK dominated.
“The British Business Bank is seeking to address that, and I was part of the LIFT initiative Long-term Investment for Technology and Science) which has got pension fund backing through the Business Bank to seek to address that follow-on capital for life sciences businesses. And we have the British Growth Partnership announced.
“Importantly, we’re also seeing big changes happening in the capital markets itself and there’s a big reform happening with the Stock Exchange both on listing rules on corporate governance to make it easier and then, very importantly, in a partnership between the Government, the FCA and the Stock Exchange something called PISCES (Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System) coming, which is really allowing a business, that is growing fast and needs that depth of capital, the ability also to look at the liquidity they bring in to look at their cap table.
“So it’s a big issue for our life sciences getting that depth of capital. There are now a range of different government private sector initiatives coming together to try and address that.”
Kristin-Anne Rutter, executive director Cambridge University Health Partners, one of the UK’s eight academic health science centres, raised the topic of commercial arrangements with the NHS.
“I think that’s actually been one of the stumbling blocks; there are mechanisms that if the NHS supports testing and innovation, how does it benefit? How does it make money down the road flow back? We need to have commercial arrangements that not just cover the costs so that you do cut the cost of the clinician and there’s the data entry. When you first sign that deal, you also think about if this technology is successful how will we procure it for all the NHS? How do we that routinely?
And secondly, if that technology is successful and it goes on to get sold in our markets, how does it benefit from that?”
“The other area we need to move forward with is NHS data. It’s a treasure and a national asset but I tend to think about it as gold in the ground. It is there, it’s very dirty and it’s very deep down and someones’ got to invest to make sure we can mine that and it’s not easy.
“But I do think that the recent changes with the federated data platforms and the secure data environment standards, now is the best chance in a long time of getting that data in a position where it can be used to support research, testing, trials and then delivery of very strong healthcare.”
Dr June Raine, CEO of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said the MHRA was ‘upstream’ from this research but: “It is a position where it can be incredibly influential as to how the downstream can be ready to introduce these brilliant inventions.”
She continued: “Regulation doesn’t stand still. Our mantra has to be – given the vibrancy of the scientific community – that regulation follows science and in fact works hand in hand with science.
“If anybody is thinking this is stable, no it isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. So in three particular ways, clinical trials is one. We’re overhauling that legislation. And today we’re announcing point of care manufacture: take the manufacturer to the hospital, to the bedside, to the operating theatre for cancer vaccines; and of course, the big one is med tech. We’re starting with the post market surveillance – safety is our first priority – but we’re all looking hard at how we regulate AI.
“We’ve got the AI Airlock, a sandbox for people to play in to define the levels of evidence that we as a regulator, should look for.
“We’re getting the diagnostics right. That will dictate someone’s healthcare. So I think regulation is exciting – and you don’t often hear exciting regulation in the same sentence – but now is the time for us in the UK to do something different.”
Discussion chair Professor Sir Mark Caulfield asked what could be one better in terms of supporting research and innovation around financing?
Irene Graham said one of the big shifts in the last couple of years had been the collaboration between universities and the attraction of private sector investment. That had driven forward both the UK’s technology clusters and the investments around them. This would be “very important” going forward; “I think that’s a shift and an opportunity”.
She continued: “On the skill set side, how do we get that right? A lot of our scaleups want access to peers and non-execs and those that have been there and seen it before and those taking businesses globally. So how do we make sure that connection is working as effectively as possible?”
Turning to state investment, she said: “You’re actually seeing the US Government buying into our early innovation. So how do we use Government UK procurement as a lever to really fast forward some of our R&D innovation and carve that out of some of the processes that are currently pretty clunky. The US Government does that very well and still doing that in the UK with life sciences.”
Matt Whitty, director of commercial partnerships at MDClone, the data and analytics platform, said: “One of the things that I see now, and in my last role, was actually accessing data is extremely hard.
“So if you’re a clinician or researcher, despite millions of pounds of investments in getting the data into machines and making it interoperable across systems actually using the data is very hard. The reason is all the tools around that are designed for data experts. So that can be a real challenge.
So that’s one thing that we do to help organisations through our platform and we had a really good example of some work in the United States with Veterans Health Administration and the creating a synthetic version of the health data centre that people are interested in exploring, opening that up to algorithm developers to develop and train on the synthetic data set. So you get the privacy enhancement but actually there is no personal health information in there which enables the organisation to freely share it outside. Then you can retest the algorithms on real world data. It’s a really neat system for a way to more rapidly develop it.”
For Professor Caulfield this raised the issue of skills. “Matt and Irene have hinted at some of this, but there is a skills gap in health data science that we don’t have. At my university (Queen Mary’s Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry) we’re just changing the curriculum so that doctor and every dentist and every scientist will be trained in health data science.
“Some of the people inventing it here in this room or hosting the inventions’ inventors on their sites will be generating AI apps and various other things that will become applicable to healthcare. The most important principle of medicine is: first of all, do no harm; therefore our graduates need to be able to say’No, something’s wrong with what that thing is telling me’ and not do anything with that data.”
Kristin-Anne Rutter said a look at the skills gap in the Cambridge region found three big areas; “One was more the technical area – not just the data scientists, it’s the data engineers, the people who are going to build the system, do the analysis and the lab technicians.
“It’s the people who are going be very skilled at running those cell and gene therapy catapults and actually we’ve slightly neglected that area of technical skills to support our life sciences.
“So we’ve g0t a real focus on how are we making sure that those people come in for a mix of apprenticeships, reaching out to colleges, building in new types of courses to fill that technical gap, which supports our healthcare and our life science companies.
“The second gap we recognise is scaleups and then the third one is people who are skilled at working across different environments, whether you call them the collaborators or the translators, people who can talk in the different languages of industry and academia and the NHS.
“That’s quite hard, so do we do that through shared placements, moves across organisations? How do we improve those skills. That’s another area we thought was challenging.”
Professor Caulfield added: “I’m very excited by your idea of the skills escalator, which is I think very necessary. We had a haemorrhage of postdoctoral scientists during COVID – they just decided they’d had enough, and they weren’t coming back. And so we’ve lost some of our scientific capacity. We need to rebuild that if we want to grow our sciences – we have to have the technical workforce.”
Author: Simon Penfold
Photography: Ed Nix
