{"id":691043,"date":"2026-01-12T12:28:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T12:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/691043\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T12:28:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T12:28:10","slug":"ex-moderna-executive-to-lead-uk-health-data-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/691043\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Moderna executive to lead UK health data service"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n

A senior pharmaceutical industry executive who oversaw development of Moderna\u2019s Covid-19 vaccine has been selected to lead the UK government\u2019s new health data service.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dr Melanie Ivarsson will on Monday be named chief executive of the Health Data Research Service (HDRS), which will give researchers a single access point to NHS datasets, government officials told the FT. <\/p>\n

Ivarsson previously served as chief development officer at US biotech group Moderna, where she called on Britain to cut bureaucracy <\/a>to catch up with peer countries in developing trials that could benefit health service patients.<\/p>\n

At Moderna<\/a>, Ivarsson was in charge of clinical development, taking the company\u2019s mRNA jab from early testing through to large-scale clinical trials and regulatory approval. <\/p>\n

Before joining the biotech, Ivarsson served as head of global clinical operations at Takeda following its acquisition of Shire, and previously spent nine years at Pfizer in clinical development. Earlier in her career, she held roles in US drugmaker Eli Lilly\u2019s early clinical development group.<\/p>\n

HDRS will process NHS<\/a> data under wider government plans to improve data flows and capitalise on information held by the publicly funded health system.<\/p>\n

The most contentious part of the service, which is set to go live by the end of this year and be fully operational by 2030, concerns the pricing of medical data. <\/p>\n

Experts have warned that charging pharma companies and research organisations for access to private medical information will fuel public concern over profiteering. <\/p>\n

Last year health minister Zubir Ahmed said the UK should \u201cleverage\u201d its new health data service<\/a> for the \u201cbenefit of the Treasury coffers\u201d, as well as accelerating the discovery of new treatments for NHS patients.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Government officials previously stressed that HDRS would safeguard patient privacy through tight access to data, strong encryption and monitored secure environments<\/p>\n

HDRS is being set up with about \u00a3600mn of funding from the UK government and the Wellcome Trust, a biomedical charity. <\/p>\n

In November Baroness Nicola Blackwood, chair of Genomics England, was appointed as chair of HDRS, which has been approved as a government company.\u00a0The service will be run from the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire. <\/p>\n

Lord Patrick Vallance, science and technology minister, said Ivarsson\u2019s CV \u201cspeaks for itself, not least her leadership of Moderna\u2019s mRNA vaccine programme which formed an important part of the fight against Covid-19\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Health Data Research Service will be instrumental in ensuring that health data is used to improve health, speeding up discoveries and providing information to enhance healthcare delivery,\u201d he added in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691044,"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-691043","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\/115882131882676230","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691043","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=691043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}