{"id":429478,"date":"2025-09-16T18:30:18","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T18:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/429478\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T18:30:18","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T18:30:18","slug":"uk-set-on-resolving-standoff-with-big-pharma-science-minister-says-pharmaceuticals-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/429478\/","title":{"rendered":"UK set on resolving standoff with big pharma, science minister says | Pharmaceuticals industry"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UK is determined to resolve its standoff with the pharmaceutical industry and reverse a 10-year decline in NHS spending on medicines, the science minister has told MPs after a string of drugmakers cancelled projects worth nearly \u00a32bn<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Patrick Vallance, a former executive at drugmaker GSK, said the country needed to increase spending on medicines and reverse a decade of declining investment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are determined to solve this,\u201d Lord Vallance told the Commons science committee. \u201cThis is not something [where] we\u2019re sitting saying let\u2019s watch the decline of the industry. That\u2019s what\u2019s happened for the past 10 years. We must not do that. We have to act. Now is a pivotal moment \u2026 to try to get this right.\u201d<\/p>\n

MPs called an emergency session in response to last week\u2019s decision by the US drugmaker Merck, known as MSD in Europe, to scrap its plans for a \u00a31bn London research centre<\/a> and lay off 125 scientists partly based at the capital\u2019s Francis Crick Institute. MSD blamed \u201cthe challenges of the UK not making meaningful progress towards addressing the lack of investment in the life science industry\u201d.<\/p>\n

AstraZeneca announced on Friday that it was putting a \u00a3200m new laboratory in Cambridge on hold<\/a>. It abandoned a \u00a3450m investment in its Speke vaccine site in January after months of negotiations, citing a cut in government support.<\/p>\n

Vallance, who became a household name as chief scientific adviser during the Covid pandemic<\/a>, told MPs on Tuesday that the NHS\u2019s spending on medicines had been in decline as a proportion of total healthcare spend since 2015, but said the figure would increase from the current 9%.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason we need to reverse that direction is not just price,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about saying we need to make sure that we get rapid uptake of the best new medicines and we have equitable access right across the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the UK\u2019s drugs regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and the National Institute for Health<\/a> and Care Excellence, which decides which medications will be available on the NHS, needed to be linked.<\/p>\n

Dr Zubir Ahmed, the new health under-secretary and a Scottish surgeon, said the UK needed to change its pricing models in recognition of new cutting-edge treatments, which are more expensive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to look at medicines in a different light \u2026 and calculate the economic and clinical benefit on that basis,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Vallance said the government had not formally restarted talks with the pharmaceutical industry over its medicine pricing mechanism, which collapsed last month without an agreement<\/a> and has been cited as one of the factors in drugmakers cancelling projects, but ministers were holding \u201clots of discussions around the commercial environment in the UK\u201d with companies.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe cannot afford to lose this industry from the UK,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s very important that we have two large global companies. That matters, that it\u2019s two,\u201d he said, referring to AstraZeneca<\/a> and GSK.<\/p>\n

Earlier on Tuesday, MPs heard from MSD\u2019s UK head, Ben Lucas, who said it was a \u201csad day that we\u2019re leaving because we valued our collaboration with the Crick\u201d. The company also plans to close its animal health site in Milton Keynes and transfer the work to Austria.<\/p>\n

AstraZeneca\u2019s UK president, Tom Keith-Roach, told MPs: \u201cWe are involved now in a highly constructive conversation with government at the highest level, notwithstanding that this is an extremely difficult moment in history and a very substantial challenge; the issue of under-investment in medicines has been a continued and worsening trend in the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n

The head of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, Richard Torbett, said the UK was losing out to the US, Belgium, Ireland, Singapore and Germany.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UK is determined to resolve its standoff with the pharmaceutical industry and reverse a 10-year decline in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-429478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115215402508791204","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}