Finding and fixing leaks in the UK’s pharmaceutical pipeline
Professor Michael Hopkins (SPRU, University of Sussex Business School)
Dr Philippa Crane (SPRU, University of Sussex Business School).
How did you come to this topic?
We began working together over 15 years ago at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, researching trends in the financing of the UK’s emerging small innovative life sciences firms and publishing on this topic for academic and policy audiences. At the time, soon after the 2008 financial crisis, the UK was just putting together its first sector-specific industrial strategies. Last year, when we heard about CSEP’s research programme, we thought our deep sector-specific experience and prior research could be of interest in understanding the progress of the sector and how well the latest iteration of the Government’s industrial strategy might support these firms.
What is the focus of your project under this collaboration with CSEP?
Our research looks back to the emergence of the UK’s very first “biotech” firms, in the early 1980s, and follows the growth of what are now well over seven hundred firms that all share a common purpose – the desire to bring innovative new medicines to market. Our data captures whether these companies are still active, and if not, what happened to them, thereby charting the dynamics of the industry, including how the introduction of successive industrial strategies has impacted these dynamics.
For instance, while scaling up of UK based SMEs is an explicit objective of successive UK Life Sciences industrial strategies (2016 and 2025), which direct policy levers can policy makers use in the face of the many acquisitive overseas firms that pick off the UK’s leading firms through acquisition?
How does this research align with CSEP’s mission?
A key theme in CSEP’s mission is to show how the UK can build on science, engineering and technology capabilities to improve the competitiveness of the economy. Our research is situated within the context of the UK’s aspiration for R&D-driven economic growth, which rests disproportionately on the nation’s ability to translate biomedical research into new pharmaceutical products and retain value within the UK. CSEP’s 2024 report on the performance of the Life Science sector notes that ‘while the UK performs well on basic science, attention is needed to grasp the opportunities and translate potential innovations into commercialised products and services’ (CSEP 2024:39). Our study takes a pipeline perspective to determine how and why potential UK economic returns from the life sciences ‘leak away’, and what could be done to improve the situation for the benefit of UK PLC, economic growth and productivity.
What makes this work innovative or timely?
The latest UK Industrial Strategy sets out a ten-year goal for the country to become Europe’s foremost life sciences hub and to rank third globally, behind only the US and China. Yet there is little longitudinal research that has actually looked at how the cohorts of UK firms emerging over the years have performed. Our research can show this performance, which we will share with stakeholders and together we can develop lessons based on previous governments’ attempts to improve the performance of the UK biotech sector, and seek to influence how the present industrial strategy could be further developed.