Government to harness NHS patient data for research use
pharmafile | August 2, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing | NHS, R&D, UK, david cameron, innovation, real world data
The UK government will change the NHS Constitution in order to allow patients’ data to be used for research purposes.
In a speech to the Global Health Summit in London yesterday, British Prime Minister David Cameron said he wants both academia and the life sciences industry to be able to use NHS patients’ data to aid drug discovery.
This will open up more real world data for the industry; potentially making its R&D process more likely to be translated into positive results.
It will also act as an incentive to attract more R&D-based pharma and biotech firms to the UK.
Cameron said: “The UK is going to be the world leader when it comes to making this kind of data available and we’re going to do this by harnessing the incredible data collected by our National Health Service.”
He said that the government is looking to change the NHS Constitution so that the default setting is for patients’ data to be used for research, unless the patient opts out.
“This will make anonymised data available to scientists and researchers on a scale never seen before,” he said.
Cameron added that this would help make the UK “the best place in the world to carry out cutting edge research”.
He made particular mention of British firms AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, who both have headquarters in the UK, as well as the ‘global giants’ like Novartis and Lilly, who also have R&D operations based in the country.
He also made special mention of Oxford Nanopore, a firm near his constituency, which is developing “incredible new technology that could radically reduce the cost of sequencing a human genome”.
He concluded that the UK ‘got’ what the life sciences industry needs, and was the best country to carry out innovative research.
Ben Adams
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