Pharma industry leaders urge PM to back life sciences

The UK’s status as a world leader in the discovery and development of new medicines is under threat, and we need to double our efforts to remain in the research premier league, pharma industry leaders told Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

At a meeting arranged by No 10 and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), Dr Richard Barker, the ABPI’s director-general, said: ‘The UK is home to some of the most talented scientists in the world and there is an opportunity to turn the NHS into a laboratory for healthcare innovation, but first the government needs to make the UK a more attractive place to discover medicines, make the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) a champion of innovation and speed up patients’ access to new medicines.’

Currently the pharmaceutical sector invests £10.6m a day in medicines r&d – nine per cent of the worldwide total – and in 2007 contributed £4.3bn to the UK trade surplus, the ABPI said. But while research centres are opening up around the world, the industry in the UK is slowing and is in danger of falling into decline. Latest Office of National Statistics figures show that employment in pharma fell from 70,000 in 2006 to 67,000 in 2007.

Industry leaders from GSK, AstraZeneca, AmGen, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, sanofi-aventis, Novartis and Eisai, the ABPI and the BIA suggested ways in which the government could protect Britain’s science base. These included:

• Ensuring pioneering technologies are used to benefit NHS patients by boosting clinical trial participation by NHS Trusts;
• Making sure new medicines reach the NHS quickly by empowering NICE to become a champion of innovation;
• Setting firm goals to take the UK from the bottom quartile of European countries for the uptake of new medicines to the top;
• Identifying and addressing critical skills gaps especially in Higher Education to make the UK a future leader in the global knowledge economy;
• Implementing a favourable rate of taxation for intellectual property income to make the UK more viable for manufacturing investment.