‘UK must copy US’S Cold War lab to discover new medicines’
THE UK should lead the world in discovering future medicines by launching a research agency that apes an American Cold War tech lab that helped invent the internet, the Government’s first industrial strategy report has said.
Sir John Bell, an Oxford University scientist who authored the paper on how to boost Britain’s £64bn life sciences sector, has called for public sector investment in “high-risk moon shot programmes” to “create two to three entirely new industries over the next 10 years”.
He told The Daily Telegraph that the Government will respond with an outline “sector deal” of further investment and policy support for drug makers within “six to eight weeks”, on top of the £160m injection unveiled yesterday.
Among his recommendations is that the Government set up a Health Advanced Research Programme to direct hundreds of millions of pounds of public and industry funding into pioneering research. Emerging fields that could benefit include using artificial intelligence to help diagnose illness, genomic medicine that identifies or fixes faulty DNA and imaging tools that can spot chronic illness before symptoms present. Sir John said he took inspiration from the Americans, saying: “They do the research and use that as a way to then dominate a sector. They’ve done it very effectively with satellites and GPS and they make many multiples of what was invested.”
His report cites research agency DARPA as a body to emulate, a lab set up in 1958 to help US military technology compete with the Soviet empire. DARPA has made advances in non-military fields, including the computer networking that provided the basis for the internet and satellite technology.
Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, and Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, welcomed the report at a launch event for the strategy at the University of Birmingham yesterday. Sir John’s report also went down well with drug makers, although they called for it to be swiftly adopted. Mene Pangalos, an executive vice president at FTSE 100 giant Astrazeneca, said: “It’s a great first step, but it’s just a first step. We now need to make sure it gets implemented.”