£8 billion target still in sight

The Scotsman Conference hears that for the country’s turnover goal from life sciences to remain on track, Scotland’s innovative prowess needs to be optimised, writes David Lee

With turnover up to £5.2 billion and 40,000 people working in the sector, life sciences in Scotland is in a good place – but it cannot be complacent and must step up its efforts to remain on course to deliver an £8 billion turnover industry by 2025.

This means grasping the enormous opportunities presented by digitalisation, deepening collaboration across the whole life sciences community, turning more of our innovations into commercial benefit for Scotland – and ensuring there are enough well-trained people with the right skills to help businesses grow and thrive.

These were the big messages from this week’s Life Sciences Scotland annual conference, organised by The Scotsman at the University of Strathclyde.

The day started with a huge boost for the industry with the release of new figures from the Office of National Statistics. These showed life sciences enterprises in Scotland are turning over £5.2bn – up £1bn on the previous year’s figures – and that the whole sector employs 40,000 people across 770 organisations (including 675 private enterprises).

Dave Tudor of GSK, co-chair of the Life Sciences Scotland Industry Leadership Group (ILG), welcomed the statistics. He said life sciences was now the sixth largest economic sector in Scotland and, if it continues its upward growth curve towards £8bn by 2025, it could be one of the top three sectors.

Ivan Mckee MSP, the Scottish Government minister responsible for life sciences as part of his trade, investment and innovation portfolio, said: “Life sciences is an absolute cornerstone of where we want to take Scotland’s economy.”

The 2017 strategy had captured the challenges facing the industry very clearly, he said, and put a real focus on what the sector needed to do to reach the £8bn turnover target by 2025.

He added: “The sector is now well on the way to beating and possibly smashing that target. To do that, we need to make Scotland an attractive place to come to work and to invest. Life sciences is right at the core of what people can see that Scotland can do. What can we deliver to help the NHS and patients, but what also develops export capability?

“I know we can do a lot more in terms of life sciences exports from Scotland. We want to get businesses that are exporting a bit to expand and those not exporting to learn how to start out on the journey.”

Mckee expressed serious concern about Brexit. He said: “It is hugely problematic to Scotland’s economy, including life sciences, in terms of talent, international cooperation on research, access to markets, regulation... a whole range of issues.

“Keeping us in a single market and customs union is the least damaging result.”

Tudor praised the life sciences community for “making a difference to our economy, to employees and to the lives of patients and customers”. He said: “We are going in a really strong direction, and the trajectory of growth gives us confidence. This is great news.

“We should all be delighted and proud, but we cannot sit back and rest on our laurels. We need to gain bandwidth and drive forward in a professional, logical and structured way for Scotland.”

Tudor said patients and customers had greater knowledge and higher demands; this, combined with the march of technology, meant businesses had to “show adaptability and flexibility”.

Across Scotland, this meant much deeper collaboration across the whole life sciences community and improving our record in turning great ideas into commercial benefit.

“Scotland has a great ability to create something new and novel,” he added. “Our problem is not about creating technology or innovation, but we are not so good at translating through into commercial returns. We are addressing that and must continue to address it. We want to stop other people stealing our lunch.” Tudor later said that there were not enough people with a commercial mindset in universities and we needed to start seeing many more spin-out companies coming out of the innovation centres.

In terms of collaboration across the whole community, he said it had to go much deeper, and gave the current level of collaboration five out of ten. He thought the Academic Health Partnership (AHP) model involving the NHS, academics and industry was working particularly well in Tayside and added: “If we can design them [AHPS] with a common goal to drive value and innovation, that’s a great opportunity for us.”

Tudor thought Scotland couldn’t move forward in just “two or three great areas” but wanted all regions and sub-sectors to deepen collaboration to drive the industry forward. He said connectivity across the sector was also important, and that the launch of the Life Sciences Scotland website and newsletter had created a “fantastic hub”.

“We now need to take connectivity and collaboration to the next level and really grab hold of the digitalisation agenda. The seeds have been sown – now we really have to get after this,” said Tudor, who moves from a senior GSK role next year to head up the new Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, to be built at Inchinnan, Renfrewshire. However, he will remain as co-chair of the Life Sciences Scotland ILG, alongside Ivan Mckee.

Tudor said: “This is a massive opportunity, but don’t be complacent. We have to raise the bar and drive ambition. We need to be one voice, one Scotland, and pull in one direction as hard as we possibly can.” Drcatherine Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer, said the NHS was totally supportive of greater collaboration with the life sciences industry to develop