We're World-Class at Invention. Now We Need to Be World-Class at Delivery.

UKRI’s new strategy sets exactly the right mission: advance knowledge, improve lives, drive growth. And its central insight - that discovery, translation, company-building and market access must work as a connected system - is one I’d argue for in any sector. The UK has been brilliant at the first step for decades. The next five years must be about converting that scientific strength into globally competitive companies and tangible public benefit.

Let me start with my sector, life sciences, which illustrates the problem most starkly and the opportunity most clearly. Britain is one of the great drug-discovering nations. The MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology developed the antibody humanisation technology underpinning Humira and Keytruda - two of the most important and financially successful medicines in modern medical history. KuDOS, a Cambridge spinout, discovered Olaparib, the world’s first PARP inhibitor - a breakthrough cancer medicine now generating ~$4bn global sales. London’s Institute of Cancer Research gave us Zytiga, a first-in-class prostate cancer treatment - one of Johnson & Johnson’s top sellers through the mid-2010s. I estimate that UK-discovered medicines have generated over $300 billion in global sales.

And yet only 37% of new medicines are fully available to UK patients against 90% in Germany. The UK has more avoidable deaths than elsewhere in Europe - our doctors aren’t worse, our patients just can’t get the medicines. Over a million people are missing out on NICE-approved treatments for stroke, kidney disease, asthma and diabetes right now.

This is not a science failure. It is a system failure.

For the UK to achieve its target of becoming ranked third globally in terms of new medicines fully available relative to global first licence by 2035, three things need to happen: we need to turn discoveries into investable companies before America does it for us, we need a clinical trial system fast enough to compete with China and we need to value the medicines we approve consistently with everything else government values. Fix company-building, fix clinical trials, fix how we value medicines.

Build the companies, not just the ideas

Too much of our best science ends up in American companies and backed by American investors who subsequently reap the financial rewards when groundbreaking UK science is translated into blockbuster drugs. We discover it yet other nations profit from it.

We know how to build successful biotechs and develop drugs. The people who can do it - experienced entrepreneurs, proven biotech investors, specialist CROs, expert clinician networks - already exist in the UK. We need to deploy that expertise systematically: a coordinated national effort, led by BIA, OLS, MRC and Innovate UK, that takes companies from discovery to genuinely fit to fund. A concentrated pipeline that gives VC and pension funds real visibility and real reasons to back UK biotech.

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Fix the UK clinical trials system and use it.

The NHS has something other nations cannot replicate: scale, data and a universal patient population. We are wasting it by falling further behind in clinical trials every year. UK recruitment into industry-sponsored clinical trials has fallen 64% in six years - from 50,112 patients in 2017/18 to just 18,140 in 2023/24. We have the patients and access to data but we are not connecting the two for therapeutic gain.

The government has committed to a 150-day average set-up time and to becoming one of the top three fastest places in Europe for patient access to medicines by 2030. We’ve seen some progress: average commercial trial set-up times has come down from 169 days last year to 122 days this year. But that 150-day target is five times slower than the pathway China has built - a 30 working day fast-track route, enrolment running two to three times faster thanks to large, treatment-naive patient populations, particularly in oncology and rare disease. Competing with China won’t be simple. But government, the sector and NIHR need to work together, fast, to close that gap.

There are some grounds for cautious optimism: the MHRA is now consistently meeting its statutory targets, while reforms to clinical trials, and greater investment in innovative regulatory approaches should help to make approvals faster and more predictable. Lord O’Shaughnessy’s review clearly identified the barriers, and the government has welcomed all 27 recommendations with £121 million of support.

But we’re far short: we are still losing clinical trials before they begin. Not running clinical trials here means UK-based patients lose early access to much needed treatments - fewer than 0.5% of the ~five million people in the UK living with serious diseases that current medicine cannot cure or control currently get the chance to try a new therapeutic as part of a clinical trial. It also means the NHS receives less funding, expertise leaves the system and the gap between what we discover and what the UK commercialises keeps widening.

We need better NHS data access, an end to duplicative contracting, real accountability for recruitment and physicians rewarded for research rather than buried in red tape: get these right and our position transforms. If we can’t cure or manage a disease, we should be studying it.

Close the access gap and value life consistently.

NICE raised its cost-effectiveness threshold for the first time in over twenty years. The VPAG clawback has been cut. The government has committed to doubling spending on new medicines as a proportion of GDP by 2036. The Health Data Research Service launched in April 2026 with £600 million behind it. These are not small things.

But one structural inconsistency stands in the way. HM Treasury values a healthy year at £70,000 in road safety decisions. NICE values the same year at £25,000–£35,000 when a medicine delivers it. Same citizen, same outcome yet half the value if a drug is what saves it. Closing that gap is worth exploring properly, starting with why two arms of government price the same year of life so differently.

This is a winnable decade.

The science base is extraordinary. The policy momentum is real. The financial firepower - from Innovate UK, venture capital, pension funds increasingly awake to the opportunity is there.

What has been missing is the discipline to treat discovery, translation, trials and access as a single connected system rather than four distinct stages in the drug development process. Join them up and Britain doesn’t just lead in drug discovery. It leads in medicines that reach patients.

The same problem, beyond life sciences.

This isn’t unique to medicines. In engineering biology, quantum technologies and clean energy, the UK has world-class research and watches early-stage companies migrate to the US for scale-up capital. UKRI’s ambition to help companies start, scale and stay in the UK is exactly right. The test is whether it translates into active, hands-on company support not just funding and stepping back.

Dame Kate Bingham DBE is Managing Partner at SV Health Investors and former Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author, and do not necessarily represent those of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).