UK Government gets behind medical research

Gordon Brown, the UK chancellor of the exchequer, and Patricia Hewitt, UK health secretary, have set out measures to 'improve the nation's health and wealth by making the UK a world-class environment for medical research, development and innovation'.

The Government will create 'a programme of investment and reforms', with the aim of enabling 'high quality and cost-effective medical advances to be discovered and developed quickly, cheaply and reliably'.

The framework for achieving these goals includes:

the establishment of a new National Institute for Health Research to join up the existing institutions within the broader National Health Service (NHS);

support for medical research centres of excellence;

the development of the capability within the NHS National IT System to facilitate the recruitment of patients to clinical trials and the gathering of data to support groundbreaking work on the health of the population and the effectiveness of health interventions;

a series of further reforms to improve performance and streamline unnecessary regulatory procedures that hold back the research community, including a single, IT-based data portal to ensure researchers only encounter procedures and input data once, and national roll-out of a number of model agreements to standardise approvals and permissions.

The Government has also committed itself to taking 'firm action' against animal rights extremists, an area where it claims to have made 'significant progress over the last year'.

'British biomedical companies contribute £3.7bn to our exports, and our NHS has, over the last fifty years, pioneered some of the great medical breakthroughs: the world's first ever test tube baby; magnetic resonance imaging, the MRI that allows early detection and treatment of potentially life threatening diseases; the first combined liver and bone marrow transplant,' expounded Brown, who also announced plans for clinical research partnerships linking universities, biomedical companies and the NHS, along with a review of intellectual property rights in order to help academic discoveries make their way out of the university system and into the public arena.

Sir David Cooksey, chairman of the Industry Reference Group of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration (UKCRC), responded on behalf of the UK biomedical industry: 'This action is vital to reverse the decline in clinical research and clinical trials activity that has occurred in the UK over the last few years. If we succeed in implementing the agenda to improve NHS clinical research activity, members of the UKCRC Industry Reference Group believe that the right conditions will have been set in place to allow us to grow our investment in medical r&d in the UK and that private sector investment in r&d involving the NHS should start to rise again by as much as £500m per anuum in the short to medium term and around £1bn per anuum in the medium to long term.

'This marks the start of a new partnership between Government and the biomedical industry that recognises the mutually advantageous relationship that exists.'

Further details will be announced in early 2006, when the Department of Health publishes the Government's health r&d strategy.

Additionally, the government has announced plans to double spending on stem cell research to £100m over the next two years. Brown said the money will be primarily invested in pre-commercial aspects of stem cell research - financing clinical trials within the state health service, paying for research into cell production facilities and supporting the country's stem cell bank - which is viewed as promising but high-risk by many pharmaceutical companies.

Funds will also be given to the Stem Cell Research Foundation, a non-profit organisation established earlier this year, and directed towards the establishment of a 'public-private consortium to use stem cells in drug discovery'.