Science minister vows to end standoff with pharma industry

The UK is “determined to solve” 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 £2bn.

- Julia Kollewe

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

“We are determined to solve this,” Lord Vallance told the Commons science committee. “This is not something [where] we're sitting saying: ‘Let’s watch the decline of the industry.’ That’s what’s happened for the past 10 years. We must not do that. We have to act. Now is a pivotal moment ... to try and get this right.”

MPs called an emergency session in response to last week’s decision by the US drugmaker Merck, known as MSD in Europe, to scrap its plans for a £1bn London research centre and to lay off 125 scientists partly based at the capital’s Francis Crick Institute.

MSD blamed “the challenges of the UK not making meaningful progress towards addressing the lack of investment in the life science industry”.