University of Leeds – Written evidence (LSI0069)

 

Summary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Response to Questions

 

Science and Innovation

 

Q1. How can investors be encouraged to invest in turning basic life science research into new innovations in treatment? Why has investment been lacking in this sector? Does the research base have the necessary infrastructure to be world-leading?

  1. The UK life sciences sector was identified in the Industrial Strategy Green Paper as world leading and having generated significant growth in recent years.[1] The UK life sciences sector represents one of the most productive sectors in the UK and has the potential to be one of the country’s great strengths.

 

  1. We believe that Universities, supported by the robust, tried and tested dual support system form the bedrock for discovery science; their partnerships with large teaching hospital NHS Trusts across the UK are the ideal conduit for rapid evaluation and translation.

 

  1. The establishment of UKRI offers an opportunity to build on the existing strengths of the UK Research Councils, investing in basic research and facilitating cross-disciplinary work and cross council programmes that can be really important to progress unmet needs in life science and healthcare that cannot be easily identified through single discipline research.

 

  1. The Industry Strategy Challenge Fund is welcomed as a major opportunity and significant investment (£4.7billion) to align industry demand for new life science research with UK life science research capabilities.

 

  1. Better connectivity to the medical research charity sector, which provided over £1.6 billion in research funding in 2016, could help unlock investment streams to unlock the successful development of new research that can lead to new life science interventions that benefit patients.

 

  1. The SIAs are a valuable exercise to encourage universities to work with local partners to demonstrate areas of local expertise with potential global competitive advantage. They will play a key role in helping to identify the areas of genuine strength and excellence across the UK and should shape future investment decisions in areas of growth and opportunity.

 

Q2. Why has the UK underperformed in turning basic research in the life sciences into intellectual property? What needs to be done to address this historic weakness in the UK and grow new companies to commercialise new research and related technologies in the life sciences?

  1. The University of Leeds is a major contributor to the UK’s success in the development and of new high value start-up companies and many of these are based in the life sciences.[2] In the last twenty years, we have spun out more than 100 companies and currently have six high value start-up companies on the Alternative Investment Market (more than any other UK university) with a market capitalisation of more than £530 million employing over 850 people in high value jobs. In the life sciences these include Avacta Group plc and Tissue Regenix Group plc as well as new life science start-ups such as Creavo Medical Technologies, Relitect Limited, Credentis AG, Dietary Assessment Ltd and iQur Limited.

 

  1. We recognise the Government’s ambition to boost collaboration further to keep improving how we translate world-class research into commercial outcomes and will support initiatives which help to facilitate this. As well as boosting HEIF and reforming the tax environment it could:
    1. Invest further to create more proof of concept funds that are available across the research spectrum to assist in taking research ideas through to commercialisation. Considerable effort and resource is required to progress these opportunities into propositions that are suitable for investment, licensing and/or co-development. There remains a funding gap which impacts on the ability of universities to sufficiently demonstrate and de-risk e science and knowledge to provide commercially validated technologies that the market has confidence to engage with.
    2. Ensure universities maintain autonomy to manage and commercialise their own intellectual property. The successful exploitation of IP is complex and a single, one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be fit for purpose. It is clearly in the national interest to ensure that research can be translated to market application and we believe that any approach taken to increase this activity needs to build upon the many aspects of UK university commercialisation that are internationally acknowledged as being sector-leading.

 

  1. The University of Leeds has invested £40m to create a high profile gateway to our research and innovation and a UK-leading environment for collaboration, partnership and the growth of companies based in high growth sectors that include life sciences. Nexus, a new 10,000m2 Innovation and Enterprise Centre will be a gateway to promote private and public sector partner access to our research and innovation assets and ensure effective translation of our research. Nexus will also actively incubate technology-led high value start-up companies through providing high quality offices and laboratories for 60 companies that wish to benefit from accessing the university’s knowledge, facilities and talent pool. Nexus will also build a vibrant innovation community that will include physical tenants, based within the centre, as well as virtual tenants who wish to become members of the Nexus community. The Nexus community will be established around a programme of high quality events targeted to address the concerns and needs of companies and will seek to actively support their innovation and growth through proactive support from a dedicated team of research and innovation professionals.

 

  1. It is evident that academics and early career researchers could benefit from additional training and development in enterprise and business development. At Leeds we have dedicated enterprise education programmes from Undergraduates through to Post Graduates and early career academic staff but this would benefit from further investment and support to ensure staff and future employees in the life science sector have the necessary skills to enable the growth of the sector.

 

  1. It is recognised that the Research Excellence Framework (REF) has driven a positive change towards recognising the value of impact and business collaboration throughout the academic base. The decision for REF 2021 which places specific emphasis on a University’s approach to supporting collaboration with organisations outside of HE is welcome.

 

  1. In Leeds we have benefitted from national investments that enable best practice in life science innovation to be shared and embedded elsewhere on campus. An example of success with a small but strategically targeted investment is the Medical Technologies Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC). EPSRC investment of just £13m has levered over £100m of targeted research funding, supported the development of five spinouts, and generated over £150m of downstream private sector investment to support product development and commercialisation. Collaborations, with mainly SMEs in the UK and Europe, are supporting over 50 new product developments to reach the market. Success has been achieved through world leading collaborative research coupled with the development of distinctive translation processes, employing Medtech industry sector specialists to provide expertise and leadership in translation within the university. They are developing capability nationally to effectively de-risk technology, identify clear product pathways to market at an early stage, and to create and define attractive propositions for investment in product development by both venture capital and existing companies (at TRL5). The key lies in matching world leading research and technological advances to clearly defined market and clinical need, through continuous, staged and targeted technology and product development pathways that are attractive to investors. This type of intervention needs to be embedded within research organisations as part of a long-term strategy to increase successful translation and commercialisation.

 

Q3. What can be done to ensure the UK has the necessary skills and manpower to build a world class life sciences sector, both within the research base and the NHS?

  1. There is a need for enhanced education in STEM subjects from school through to Higher Education. Programmes that actively encourage young students to engage with life science and engineering disciplines are essential in ensuring full participation in subjects that will help these important sectors grow in the future.

 

  1. Investments in major national initiatives such as “Technology Touching Life” or the “Rosalind Franklin Institute” offer enormous potential for the development and translation of new technologies for biology and drug discovery research and should be supported through the LSIS.

 

  1. Better support, and incentivisation for academic and industry staff to move across University-Industry sectors, including SMEs, would stimulate further understanding of business needs and drive an increase in academic business collaboration. This is an area we support in Leeds but further targeted investment and national strategic prioritisation of this in partnership with industry would further enable this.

 

  1. The existing workforce needs upskilling with ‘industry-ready’ engineering and life science graduates who can integrate different technology disciplines and who have gained hands-on industry experience as part of their training. Such graduates could be developed through Centres for Doctoral Training or through a postgraduate collaborative training academy, where universities and companies work together to ensure that graduates are equipped with the skills and experience needed by the UK life sciences sector.

 

  1. We support the focus on developing entrepreneurship – upskilling digital skills, leadership, and innovation across the healthcare workforce.

 

  1. Clinical academics form the “glue” spanning discovery science and translation into man. Recent data highlight a reduction in overall numbers of these vital staff across the UK, with major deficits in areas of need notably mental health, prevention and community health. This cadre of staff are also crucially involved in training the next generation of doctors. Targeted programmes to ensure sustained growth in clinical academia will be required.

 

Industrial Strategy

 

Q5. What can be learnt from the impact of the 2011 UK Life Sciences Strategy? What evidence is there that a strategy will work for the life sciences sector? How can its success be measured against its stated objectives?

  1. The 2011 Life Sciences Strategy recognised the importance of the role of the life sciences sector in improving health and driving the UK economy.

 

  1. The 2011 Life sciences strategy recognised the importance of the sector and laid foundations for the present strategy through the appointment of life science champions, including Professor Sir John Bell, who oversaw the production of the present strategy. The provision of a strong voice supporting the life sciences sector within Government has been important.

 

Q6. Does the strategy contain the right recommendations? What should it contain/what is missing? How will the life sciences strategy interact with the wider industrial strategy, including regional and devolved administration strategies? How will the strategies be coordinated so that they don’t operate in ‘silos’?

  1. The Life Sciences Industrial Strategy 2017 is very comprehensive and sets out an ambitious vision for the UK life sciences sector.

 

  1. The strategy provides welcome support for the balanced funding principle, recognising the UK’s strength in biomedical research and life science research and the importance of continued support for basic research and support around that to enable improved patient outcomes and a thriving UK life sciences business sector.

 

  1. We welcome and support the call within the strategy to maintain an association with the Innovative Medicines Initiative the world’s largest medical research Public Private Partnership, which brings together the pharmaceutical industry with academia, SMEs and others, to accelerate medicines discovery and development. We recognise that it would not be possible to recreate this scheme on a national level and therefore continued association offers the most favourable outcome for the UK.

 

  1. BEIS must have ultimate responsibility for UK industrial strategy, including Life Sciences.

 

  1. An industrial strategy for Life Sciences must be integrated and aligned to wider UK industrial strategy, providing opportunities and incentives at national and regional level.

 

Q7. What opportunities for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are there/should there be in the strategy? How can they be involved in its development and implementation?

  1. It is still challenging for SMEs to be able to easily access and benefit from research and innovation assets within research intensive HEIs. At the University of Leeds Nexus, our new innovation and enterprise centre aims to address this through sector targeted events and active programmes of engagement. Mechanisms to facilitate and enable life science SMEs to access our capabilities and work with universities from accessing expertise and consultancy through to longer term collaborative R&D, to undertaking undergraduate and graduate placements and employing graduates would be welcomed through the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy.

 

  1. The life science sector includes a mix of companies with a range of capacity and experience of engaging in innovation and collaborating with the knowledge base. It is particularly challenging for SME to engage in policy formation and large scale funding initiatives and mechanisms need to be found to enable such access.

 

  1. Life sciences SMEs need dedicated support that includes advice, expertise and finance in order to innovate, grow, become more productive, and ultimately to export high value products and services.

 

Q8. Where should the funding come from to support the implementation of the strategy?

  1. Funding for interventions to support the UK life sciences sector should be provided through a strategically aligned and joined up mix of national and regional mechanisms that might include:

 

Q9. How do the devolved administrations and city regions fit into the strategy?

  1. In the UK there is a clear need and opportunity to develop industry clusters in key sector areas where there is alignment between industry capability and research and innovation capability. These initiatives could be supported by City Regions or by national investment directed to local priorities.

 

  1. The LSIS recognises the importance of a nation-wide approach and as such it will be important to ensure connectivity and collaboration across and between clusters of activity. This will also be essential in enabling the single front door for collaborators and investors to be able to access these aligned but distributed capabilities.

 

NHS Procurement and Collaboration

 

10. How can public procurement, in particular by the NHS, be an effective stimulus for innovation in the Life Sciences Sector? Can it help support emerging businesses in the Life Sciences sector?

  1. NHS procurement processes are often given as the main reason for innovators ‘avoiding the UK’ altogether, leading to a number of genuinely valuable innovations costing, in particular SMEs, significant amounts of money. There are often major challenges in adoption further downstream and so these investments often do not yield the returns that had been hoped for. In our view, there needs to be a paradigm shift to a genuine culture of open innovation, both in the commercial world and in the health and care sector that promotes collaborative innovation, supported by transparent and consistent procurement processes that are clear from the start.

 

  1. A short term perspective can also hamper innovation and adoption into the NHS. The challenge of not being able to demonstrate immediate savings seems to be one of the primary reasons for innovations failing to be adopted, even if they can demonstrate financial savings and improved patient experience further on.

 

34.   The Government could consider running pilot initiatives to help facilitate the take-up of innovative services and technology ideas from university research in the NHS and other areas of the public sector. Leeds has established the Leeds Academic Health Partnership - LAHP (http://www.leedsacademichealthpartnership.org/) to create the conditions for great ideas to be transformed into life changing initiatives. The LAHP is harnessing the full potential of the city’s assets by bringing together our three universities (Leeds, Leeds Beckett and Leeds Trinity), NHS organisations and the City Council to create an ambitious alliance and this offers an ideal environment to test and demonstrate the take-up of new ideas and technologies from universities into the NHS.

 

  1. Many of these measures identified in the ‘Better Procurement Better Value Better Care: A Procurement Development Programme for the NHS report[3] simply need to be implemented at an accelerated pace:

 

  1. In addition to these points, learning gained from the NHS Innovation Test Bed Programme indicates that SMEs in Life Sciences face barriers in competing for larger contracts and get crowded out by larger players. Providing smaller ‘lots’ within procurement exercises is key to increasing their opportunities to tender.

 

Q11. How can the recommendations of the Accelerated Access Review be taken forward alongside the strategy? Will the recent changes to the NHS England approval process for drugs have a positive or negative effect on the availability of new and innovative treatments in the NHS? How can quick access to new treatments and the need to provide value for money be reconciled?

  1. An Accelerated Access Pathway (Chapter 2) requires alignment and coordination of regulatory, reimbursement, evaluation and diffusion processes to bring transformative products to patients more quickly.

 

  1. An effective means to achieve this would include strengthening the role of collaborative trialling and testing as a fast track procurement route by, for example, exploring the scope for guaranteed adoption of collaboratively trialled products and services where these have produced positive (evidenced) results

 

  1. In respect of the Review’s call for better evidence of the efficiency gains from technologies to enable faster uptake of innovation in the healthcare system could be greatly assisted by investment in and deployment of combined rapid evaluation and modelling to support the process. This will require investment in both the skills and capacity across HEI’s to support development of this capability.

 

  1. The Access Review recommends that the NHS should develop an enhanced horizon scanning process and clarify its needs to innovators together with a single set of national and local routes to get technologies to patients. Partners across the NHS, HEI’s and the Local Authority in Leeds are investing in a new (single door, single structure) Health Innovation Gateway to address the access and navigation needs of Life Science Innovators. These types of initiatives should be supported and expanded.

 

Q12. How can collaboration between researchers and the NHS be improved, particularly in light of increased fiscal pressures in the NHS? Will the NHS England research plan help in this regard? How can the ability of the NHS to contribute to the development of and adopting new technology be improved?

  1. The NHS contribution to the development of and adoption of new technology can be improved by addressing current and future (anticipated) skills gaps and by investing in skills needed to support effective use of technology consistent with patient and centred approaches to health and care. Initiatives launched to date have focussed on strengthening the skills of small cohorts of senior leaders. However the rapid spread of Life Science Technology Enabled Care will require measures which reach wider across the entire workforce. In Leeds, partners in the local and health care system are developing a Health and Care Skills Academy which will support digital skills and learning development of the 57,000 employees as preparation for the transformation of services.

 

  1. A key factor here is the issue of “permission” ensuring that the very rich patient/ population data embedded within the NHS is freely available for research – albeit within the confines of the Data Protection Guardian. Urgent progress is required in this space with “opt out” rather than “opt in” being the norm.

 

Responsibility and Accountability?

 

Q13. Who should take responsibility for the implementation of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy and to whom should they be accountable? What should the UK Government’s role be? What should the role of the academic, charitable and business sectors be?

  1. Responsibility for implementation should ultimately lie with BEIS and the Office of Life Sciences, with clear links to the Department of Health strategy. We believe that a dedicated Life Health Science Minister co-ordinating the key partners and ensuring implementation to a defined delivery plan that includes key milestones, outputs and outcomes would be really helpful.

 

  1. The LSIS must also fit within the wider Industrial Strategy so clear plans to enable that will be required.

 

  1. There is a clear role for key City Regions / Local Enterprise Partnerships. Universities, innovation organisations, NIHR, businesses all have an important role to play. While it is difficult to draw all stakeholders into a common agenda nationally, regions and places offer an opportunity to achieve alignment and common purpose.

 

Q14. What is the role of companies within the sector, particularly the large pharmaceutical companies, in the implementation of the strategy? How are they accountable for its success?

  1. It is essential that the sector as a whole develops within the UK.

 

  1. The transformation of the pharmaceutical sector is also important which will require the development of new technologies (which are likely to be at too early a stage to be developed and then adopted within large pharma companies). In particular these technologies would drive drug discovery and development which require significant pipelines of investment and resource to progress to the stage required for adoption within drug discovery organisations.

 

  1. The Astbury Centre at the University of Leeds[4] is pioneering new research in early stage drug discovery and underpinning enabling technologies. This requires new models for industry engagement and collaboration to support such early stage and essential new drug discovery.

 

Q15. Does the Government have the right structures in place to support the life science sector? Is the Office of Life Sciences effective? Should the Government appoint a dedicated Life Sciences Minister? If so, should that Minister have UK-wide or England-only responsibilities?

  1. The Office for Life Sciences serves as an effective bridge between BEIS and DoH and will be essential for the implementation of the LSIS.

 

  1. It would be helpful if the Minister leading the implementation of the LSIS had a UK-wide remit.

 

Brexit

 

Q16. What impact will Brexit have on the Life Sciences sector? Will the strategy help the sector to mitigate the risks and take advantage of the opportunities of Brexit?

  1. The mobility of research staff if essential to underpin the future success of research and innovation in the UK. It will be essential that Brexit does not lead to an adverse impact of the ability of the UK to attract and retain talented research staff from across the world.

 

  1. Access to EU research partners and support for collaborations is essential to facilitate European and international research collaborations.

 

  1. The University of Leeds has continued to be successful in engaging with and securing investment from EU funding programmes since Brexit. We strongly support opportunities for UK universities to continue to be able to engage in EU research programmes in the future.

 

  1. The best results for the new industrial strategy and LSIS will be achieved by building on the strength of the UK’s higher education and research systems. A positive outcome from the Brexit negotiations is needed that will actively support universities like Leeds to be able to attract, recruit and retain talented staff and students and also to be able to continue to collaborate with Europe for research and student education, as well as providing Continuing Professional Development training to local industries, and provide cutting edge knowledge through consultancy and professional advice.

 

Q17. How should the regulatory framework be changed or improved after Brexit to support the sector?

  1. Continued alignment with EU regulations has been beneficial across many areas of research, particularly around clinical trials and rare disease research. Regulation should be considered on a case by case basis to ensure that the potential benefits of increased flexibility or bespoke national regulation can be realised.

 

Author: Dr Ceri Williams, Director of Research and Innovation Development

 

15 September 2017

 

 

[1] https://beisgovuk.citizenspace.com/strategy/industrial-strategy/supporting_documents/buildingourindustrialstrategygreenpaper.pdf

[2] Higher Education-Business and Community Interaction Survey (HEBCI) 2014/15 survey

[3] Better Procurement Better Value Better Care: A Procurement Development Programme for the NHS report, 2013’

[4] http://www.astbury.leeds.ac.uk/