A grid of cardiovascular MRI scans and analysis images in various color schemes, showing heart structures and tissue details
MyCardium, co-founded by Professor James Moon of UCL’s Institute of Cardiovascular Science, uses artificial intelligence to interpret and spot issues in heart scans © Mycardium

The writer is chief executive of UCL Business

Eyebrows were raised at the Labour party’s conference in Liverpool this week when I said that the chancellor, with all eyes on next month’s Budget, should look at life sciences for quick wins.

We shouldn’t sugarcoat Merck and AstraZeneca’s retreat from UK investment. But as leader of UCL’s technology transfer company, which takes the university’s most promising medical research and deep-tech inventions from lab to market, I remain optimistic about the UK being a world leader in health innovations.

AI and life sciences are converging in the spaces where universities, hospitals and investors collaborate, morphing traditional life science disciplines into new specialisms: data-driven diagnostics, predictive prognostics and healthcare planning. These technologies can dramatically reduce the time from scientific discovery to creating viable businesses that deliver better outcomes for patients and fuel growth.

I’ve seen this before. Twenty-nine years ago, as a Harvard researcher, I was working in the foothills of the gene-therapy revolution. That boom was driven by brilliant academics willing to step away from their labs and take breakthroughs to market.

This enterprising spirit is now infusing the UK’s own world-leading universities. Every day our teams help academics realise research potential: honing entrepreneurial skills, establishing spinout businesses, licensing IP, testing markets and connecting to sources of investment.

The spinout sector across the UK is flourishing; £2.6bn in equity investment in 2024, even as wider high-growth company investment declined by 19 per cent. UCL Business alone has attracted £3bn in spinout investment over five years, creating over 2,000 jobs across 104 companies.

But the UK could be doing so much more to leverage economic growth from university research. Academics tell me the biggest challenge is taking the first steps — prototyping products and finding the market fit.

Shortly before the conference, the government announced £9mn of awards (from a £40mn fund) to help 48 exciting ventures to get off the ground. But it was hugely oversubscribed with potentially game-changing innovations in need of a modest sum to get them ready for investors. One of those could be the next British unicorn. Why not expand this scheme?

The UK also has a major problem with scale-up investment: capital willing to take risks and wait for the returns. All too often, I see spinouts having to go to the US for capital — and the quid pro quo is often jobs and facilities established over there instead of here. This is where the beefed-up British Business Bank can play a key role in securing investment for university innovations, crowding in more UK venture capital.

Above all, we need to make sure the biggest market for these innovations is open to our pioneering spinouts — I’m talking about the NHS. During meetings at Labour’s conference this week, I heard health charities crying out for a rewriting of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s rules so that the new generation of clinically proven treatments developed here in the UK — such as gene therapies and immunotherapies for cancers, Alzheimer’s and rare diseases — can reach patients who desperately need them, on the NHS.

And while we’re at it, let’s overhaul the NHS’s complex and inefficient procurement. There’s a wealth of medtech spinouts ready to improve diagnostics, non-pharma therapies and AI-based healthcare improvements.

The new business secretary wants to see the UK’s first trillion-dollar company. The health secretary promised this week: “We will make the UK the home of the next generation of medical breakthroughs — discovered here, developed here, and delivered here on the NHS.” If we can help our life science spinouts scale up and grow, both those ambitions could be realised sooner than we think.

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