NHS must adopt new technologies faster, says minister
pharmafile | February 28, 2012 | News story | Research and Development | ABPI, NHS, Whitehead, Willetts, innovation
The NHS needs to speed up its adoption of new technology, according to universities and science minister David Willetts.
Echoing criticism from GlaxoSmithKline chief executive Sir Andrew Witty in recent commments on the BBC, Willetts said: “The NHS can sometimes be a late adopter. It should be much more prompt in taking on new technologies.”
He also said stratified medicine has put a premium on the way information is shared for medical use. “It’s vital that there should be access to data across the NHS,” he added.
Willetts was speaking at an ABPI parliamentary event on innovation, hosted by Andrew Miller MP, chair of the science and technology select committee.
On the same platform, ABPI chief executive Stephen Whitehead agreed: “My biggest frustration is with the low uptake and adoption of innovation.”
But Whitehead was not so concerned with cost – another of Witty’s bugbears in his outspoken BBC interview. “I have less of a problem with price,” Whitehead admitted.
On the subject of inward investment by pharma companies, he expressed disappointment that the fate of Pfizer’s Sandwich plant, earmarked for closure a year ago, had been presented in the media as a “disaster”.
He insisted: “This industry isn’t packing up and leaving the UK, it’s investing in a different way.”
Willetts had already said the introduction of the Patent Box incentives meant GSK was “looking at the location for a new manufacturing facility at the moment”.
GSK has in fact only committed to a feasibility study, the results of which should be out before the end of June, on siting its next biopharma manufacturing facility in England or Scotland.
Whitehead continued by highlighting the way in which the R&D landscape has altered. “R&D is changing very dramatically,” he went on. “But don’t interpret that change as a declining industry. It’s not.”
He pointed out that a significant proportion of drugs are no longer discovered in-house. “It’s not about bricks and mortar, it’s about partnerships and relationships,” he said. “Fifty per cent of medicines in the pipelines of our member companies were licensed-in.”
Despite this change, with small outfits discovering molecules which are then developed elsewhere, he said large companies remained the only ones who could “absorb the risk” of bringing a product to market.
UK R&D remains vital for health services, he said, warning that there would be a “social care implosion” unless a cure for Alzheimer’s is found.
Former Labour business minister Lord Drayson suggested that pharma companies need to adjust their thinking in other areas, since the UK is no longer able to compete on price alone against the rest of the world when it comes to staging late-stage trials.
“We are not going to be able to be competitive in large scale phase III clinical trials,” said the politician and entrepreneur, who co-founded PowderJect Pharmaceuticals. “On price, it’s very unlikely. So in what type of trials can we add value?”
Lord Drayson suggested that genetics and better use of information from the NHS database – with appropriate safeguards – could be areas in which the UK’s expertise might bear fruit in future trials.
Adam Hill
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