A vision for the future: Can Britain become a biotech superpower?
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The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2022
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
The government recently published a Life Sciences Vision, but how much vision was there? This podcast will look at the importance of the industry, the hurdles that it faces and its contribution to the government's Global Britain agenda.
Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator is joined by Anthony Browne, Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire; Zoe Martin, a policy manager at Cancer Research and Samin Saeed who is the medical director & chief scientific officer for Novartis Pharmaceuticals UK Ltd.
This podcast is kindly sponsored by Novartis Pharmaceuticals UK Ltd.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When the AstraZeneca vaccine first started to be rolled out, it was hailed by the government as a |
| 0:06.6 | success for global Britain. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, saw in that episode a kind of |
| 0:12.7 | example of how Britain could speed up regulation, make itself less bureaucratic and become a worldwide |
| 0:18.2 | home for biotech and innovation. So is life science |
| 0:22.4 | is going to be the next big thing for Britain? And what, if anything, should the government be |
| 0:26.6 | trying to do to help? It recently published a life science vision. That was the official narrative. |
| 0:32.1 | But how much vision was there? I'm Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, and in this special podcast, I'll be talking |
| 0:38.9 | to Anthony Brown, who's a long-time spectator, Victoria MP for South Cambridgeshire, a place which, by the way, |
| 0:45.1 | now boasts the title of the European Capital of Life Sciences. I'll be talking to Zoe Martin, who is a policy |
| 0:51.2 | manager at Cancer Research, a charity that raises billions for |
| 0:55.5 | pharmaceutical research and spends about a third of a billion pounds a year on cancer research |
| 1:00.9 | alone. And Samina Saeed, who's UK chief scientific officer at Novartis, which is kindly sponsoring |
| 1:07.5 | this podcast. So to start with, Anthony, can you perhaps help us with the terminology? |
| 1:13.2 | I mean, 15 years ago, you spoke about pharmaceuticals, then we spoke about biotech. Now we're |
| 1:19.1 | speaking about life science. What does it mean? Are these basically different words for the same thing? |
| 1:26.5 | So the science is developing very, very rapidly, and we're actually on the verge of a major |
| 1:31.0 | revolution, which is largely based around genomics, but also the application of artificial |
| 1:35.2 | intelligence. So we now can decode the human genome. I've got the Welcome Sanger Institute |
| 1:40.6 | in South Cambridgeshire. They've decoded the genome of 500,000 people. They've put that |
| 1:45.3 | out in the public domain. We've got all the records from the NHS anonymised. We're looking at how |
| 1:50.3 | people's individual genes respond to different therapies. We're using it decoding DNA to |
| 1:55.5 | diagnose different types of cancers. You can far more accurately diagnose cancers. And then you'll be |
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