Life science leaders and experts gathered at The Times Life Sciences Summit to discuss how the UK can strengthen the sector in challenging times. 

The inaugural Summit featured sessions with Lord Patrick Vallance, Minister for science research and innovation and Dr. Dominic King, Health VP at Microsoft AI. Both engaged in fireside discussions with Tom Whipple, science editor at The Times.

Lord Patrick Vallance detailed the execution of the UK’s life sciences strategy. Lord Vallance emphasised that the UK’s traditional hurdle has fundamentally shifted: the challenge is no longer moving science out of the academic lab into a startup, but rather scaling-up those companies into global commercial businesses.

He said; “Our ‘valley of death’ is scale-up. It shouldn’t be the case that our FTSE top 50 looks similar to how it looked 20 years ago. We need insurgent companies coming up and taking over… Our ambition remains simple: to be the leading life sciences country in Europe and number three in the world.” 

Other key takeaways from Lord Patrick Vallance session:

• The scaling problem: “You’ve got to do everything from releasing more capital, making sure that the procurement system is such that you pull that innovation through quickly, ensuring the regulations are in the right place, making sure the infrastructure is there, making sure the skills are there.”

“Our scale-up companies now get over 80% of their capital from overseas investment. I don’t mind the fact that there’s overseas investment coming in, but we’re losing out on that. That’s why the Mansion House Compact and accord on pensions is so important. Get the pension funds releasing capital into that.

That is starting. Now, is it as fast as everyone wants? No, but it’s starting. And I really believe that’s going to change quite rapidly.”

• Clinical trial velocity: “We wanted to reduce the time for clinical trials set up. And my view is those statistics need to be, those numbers need to be public so everyone can see whether we’re doing it. We’ve reduced that time by 47 days so far. It’s going to go down further.”
• NHS procurement & medicine spend: “If you look at the percentage spent on medicine in the NHS, it’s drifted down from about 15% to about 10% or even less, over a period in which medicines have revolutionised the treatment… Modern medicines have completely changed the way we practise and the way we can treat and we demand them as patients. So we’ve got to be able to get those, and if you’re going to get them, you’ve got to increase the amount you spend on them.”

• Calls for NICE to adopt medicines into the NHS faster: “NICE was then supposed to say, once we’ve said yes, we adopt it right the way across the NHS quickly. That has fallen by the wayside. It’s not what’s happening. So we’ve got two things. We need to get faster adoption and uptake. And we need to then, because the cost per quality threshold hasn’t changed since NICE was formed, hasn’t changed for 20 plus years, we need to make sure that is a credible cost per quality.”
• Use of health data: “The benefits from these are enormous, I mean truly enormous, and we cannot end up in a position where you can’t have the benefits because we’re all so terrified of any data being used any more.”

Dr Dominic King was talking to the audience about Copilot Health (currently rolling out to US adults 18+), which uses AI and is designed to navigate standard patient queries.

He said; “If you doubled the number of doctors and nurses tomorrow, they would still find themselves very stretched. AI services will become the new front door to healthcare… mopping up standard questions and allowing bricks-and-mortar services to focus on what they do best.”

Other key takeaways from Dr. Dominic King:

• The scale of demand: “It’s estimated there’s probably about a billion searches on the internet about health every day. But they’re usually done without individual context…  It (Copilot Health) allows you to bring context together, wearable data, electronic health record data, all the PDFs that we all end up with from our blood tests and various other things.”

• Superhuman medical intelligence: “There’s no human on earth, no physician, however expert, that can do all of that (be a specialist and generalist). I think what we see with these AI systems now is that they can go very broad, but they can also go incredibly deep. And we would view that as superhuman medical intelligence.”
• How CoPilot Health can help:  “I do think that the ideal scenario is that we (Copilot Health) can mop up a lot of the standard questions that most of us don’t feel able to answer and allow the bricks and mortar services to focus on what they’re best at doing, which is complex, challenging clinical scenarios.”
• Safety & reliability: “And there’re various approaches that we take to making sure that they are, that they can be trusted. Very expansive clinical evaluations, real-time monitoring. And we’re also very thoughtful about how we train models and what data we’re building.”