Ministers will have their work cut out as the UK has too often failed to translate medical breakthroughs into blockbusters made in Britain. An example is monoclonal antibodies, a common component of biological drugs discovered at Cambridge University in the Seventies.
It led to a Nobel Prize for the scientists involved and has since exploded into a field worth around 70bn globally today. Yet just 3,000 of the 100,000 people working in this area are in Britain. Over the past eight years the UKs historic status as a major net exporter of medicines has been gradually dwindling.
Since 2009, every year bar one has seen a lowering of net exports of pharmaceutical products and medical devices, with the UK even becoming a net importer for the first time on record in 2014, according to UN trade data. So what barriers will industry and the Government have to overcome to make the UK a medicines manufacturing powerhouse once again?
Britains drug makers outlined a blueprint this week for doing just that, in a report entitled Manufacturing Vision for UK Pharma. In it they called on government to invest up to 140m to build a further threedrugmanufacturing centres of excellence, like the one in Stevenage. They also urged pharmaceutical firms to learn from their counterparts in the automotive and aerospace industries on how to partner with government and pool research and development efforts.
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How do you turn world-leading British science into medicines? - Telegraph.co.uk
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