Wendy Austin’s popular radio show Inside Business presents commentary and analysis on business and the economy in Northern Ireland. This week her focus was on Life & Health Sciences.
Wendy Austin brought together Dr Stephen Barr, Managing Director at Almac Sciences, Dr Frances Weldon, Business Alliance Manager Medicine, Health and Life Sciences at Queen’s University, Mark Campbell, Senior Manager with Randox Laboratories and Professor Tony Bjourson, Director of the Centre for Personalised Medicine at Ulster University to talk about the importance of the Life & Health Sciences sector in Northern Ireland.
Wendy began by noting that with 130 companies, 7,500 people, turnover approaching £1bn and 12.5% of all Northern Ireland exports, the sector was developing rapidly. She asked the panel to what extent they felt university research was led by patient need.
Tony Bjourson started off by saying, “Companies are increasingly coming to us, recognising the discoveries that we have made and their potential as clinical products that can benefit patients, but also their potential to become commercial products. Our objective is not just to work with local companies such as Almac and Randox but also further afield – we are currently talking to pharmaceutical companies in India and Japan about possible collaboration.
“It is really exciting to be working in this area but it is also really important that the output of the research that we undertake is actually translated into products that have an impact, not only on patient health and wellbeing but also in the development of commercial products.”
Mark Campbell added, “Diagnostics is not only very exciting but essential. Health care services everywhere are struggling, in fact we would say that we don’t really have health care services, we have sickness management services. And our piece in this life sciences jigsaw is to be able to predict and intervene with disease at the very earliest stage. That will always be better for the individual and will always reduce the burden on the health care services.”
Wendy noted how diagnostics were really coming into their own now, given the rapid developments in precision medicine, which could not work unless the right diagnosis was in place.
Mark agreed, adding, “We have become more and more intelligent about how we apply therapies and we know that some therapies will work on one individual and not another, so by very careful examination of a patient’s blood profile or genetic profile we can predict much more accurately whether it will work or not. A key element within this is multi-plex testing. That’s multiple tests at the same time and we think there is a great need for really developing and exploiting this on a very large scale in order to predict and intervene early.”
Moving on to the topic of bringing discoveries to market, Wendy asked Dr. Frances Weldon about her work at Queen’s.
“I help connect industry with our research academics who are working in areas such as cancer, respiratory medicine, ophthalmology and diabetes, enabling access to research expertise to allow industry to develop products and also to allow our researchers to take their research to the patient.” Frances said. “It’s not just about academia and industry working in partnership – our health and social care system needs to be involved too and of course the patient sits at the heart of it all, because it is ultimately about delivery of improved patient outcomes.”
Wendy asked Stephen Barr whether he thought that Northern Ireland offered a special kind of microclimate for Life & Health Sciences.
“I think we have got the building blocks of something that could be special.” he said. “We have research excellence within the universities, we have large established industry, we have got small innovative companies and we have got a talent pool that we need to continue to develop. I think the building blocks are there to be really successful, but there are still issues that need to be addressed within the health and life science sector.
“Health care is going to change, with fewer block buster drugs being developed and more targeted therapies. This will mean unique products need to be developed and this area has a lot of potential for growth, but it will take a lot of visionary leadership, investment and skills based development. This is one of the areas that would concern me most as the needs are much greater than the supply at the moment, so we really need to develop further skills and invest in the development of those skills.”
“Industry and universities have to work together to ensure that the workforce is educated to the needs of industry. We need investment from government to go into higher education. We recruit heavily within Northern Ireland, but we’ve had to go much further afield to supply our needs. We now have 2,300 staff in Craigavon alone, about 3,800 people globally. I can see us recruiting another 200-300 people over the next number of years. We will have to go outside of Northern Ireland to recruit those people, because at the moment there just isn’t the supply base that we need.”
Tony Bjourson agreed that this was a problem. “This has been recognised by, for example, the Academy of Medical Sciences, a recent House of Lords inquiry and an EU report. Precision medicine needs a variety of skills so Ulster University has developed the first BSc degree that includes computational biology, computer programming, clinical trials design and medicine and biomedical sciences in one programme. We had our first intake last year of 20 students and we’re also offering post graduate qualifications to upskill the existing workforce within the NHS.”
Frances Weldon added, “Queen’s University is working in partnership with Almac and Randox to develop degree programmes and post graduate programmes. With Randox we have a scholarship placement arrangement in place as well, which offers up to 40 scholarships for students from across disciplines, not just the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, but also from engineering, because there’s a lot of interdisciplinary work that needs to happen to develop the diagnostics of the future.
“We have a PhD programme in precision medicine and a Masters in translational medicine which puts a commercial focus on research. In terms of the skills agenda, there’s no one magic bullet that’s going to cure it and I think it starts at second level education where really we need to be informing our brightest and best students of their options. We have a very talented pool of people in Northern Ireland and I know that companies here are very proactive in working with Business In The Community to develop programmes that enable second level students to spend time in industry to learn about these professions.”
Mark Campbell added, “The value to the life sciences industry is very clear to Northern Ireland. In the private sector we’re employing less than 1% of the total workforce, yet we’re exporting 12.5%. So this industry creates wealth, which feeds back into health, education, welfare and so on. We are punching 12½ times above our weight but there are a number of strategic issues that need to be addressed. Northern Ireland as a homogenous area with combined health and social care has got great potential. The health and social care statistical data has been described as Northern Ireland’s oil reserve, but I would say that currently we’re still drilling and we haven’t struck it yet. We can’t be complacent – we had a fantastic ship building industry 30-40 years ago! We do have a very vibrant life sciences industry, but if we don’t protect it, it’s a very competitive world out there and it will move to Shanghai, Boston or wherever.”
Moving on to the findings of the recent Matrix Life & Health Science Report, Wendy asked whether there was a disconnect between the sector’s aspirations and the reality of longer waiting lists.
Mark Campbell responded, “This goes back to my earlier comment that we largely have a sickness management service. We wait for people to get sick and then we intervene, by which stage chronic conditions have developed. We really need to move towards preventative medicine care, so we’re doing much more work with healthy people to identify the conditions they are likely to become prone to and then stop those developing, or intervene at a much earlier stage. I think the challenge the department has at the moment is that while it’s dealing with this huge burden of sickness it struggles to find the resource to reallocate into establishing these preventative care programmes.”
Stephen Barr added that although Northern Ireland had a unique healthcare system with its small demographic and electronic care records, it was not perhaps being exploited fully.
“The power of that data and the ability to be able to electronically search it is what gives us that unique advantage and it is something that I think should be explored.” he said. “At the moment there probably isn’t enough connection between industry and healthcare systems; we work with academia but we would have very little connection with the health sector itself and that’s maybe something that should change as we look to develop more innovative products and look to really bring the benefit through to the patients longer term.”
Wendy then asked Tony Bjourson whether he was concerned that all the work he and others were investing in solutions may not go anywhere because there simply isn’t the money to fund it?
He acknowledged that money would always be a problem, but added that medicine’s successes to date had created an increasingly ageing population, which in turn brought its own challenges. “The reality is the average over-65 year old is on about five or ten concurrently prescribed medications and there’s a prescribing cascade that is completely unsustainable.
“In 2003 Alan Roses from GlaxoSmithKline shocked the pharmaceutical sector by announcing that 30-50% of prescribed medications don’t work and 90% of prescribed medications don’t work on 30-50% of the people to whom they’re prescribed. Now that’s a huge inefficiency in prescribing.
“Take rheumatoid arthritis – it affects 1% of the population globally and in severe cases the individual is unable to work. There’s a blockbuster drug called anti-TNF that is life changing, but it’s only effective in about 60% of cases and it costs £12,000 per patient, per year. Individuals are normally on that drug for about six months before they’re deemed by rheumatologists to be responders or non-responders. So you’re wasting £6,000 on 40% of the people you are treating. The £1m project we are currently working on with Randox is aimed at developing biomarkers or diagnostics that will mean rheumatology patients can take a range of tests and be told at the outset whether they will respond positively.”
Frances Weldon agreed that money was always going to be a problem, but pointed out that by adopting innovation the healthcare sector would, in the long run, be more cost effective and save money. “It’s about quicker and more accurate diagnosis, it’s about targeting the right therapy at the right time to the patient.” she said. “Northern Ireland has been successful in being identified as a centre of excellence for part of the Precision Medicine Catapult – that’s a testament to the capability that we have. My sense is that there’s great momentum and great opportunity now for us to develop this sector further and it is a priority sector for the government here to develop.”
One of the major themes for catapults is the partnerships, so Wendy asked Stephen Barr whether he felt partnerships could work between the big companies or whether they would always be in competition.
He said he didn’t think there was a lot of overlap in what companies such as Randox, Norbrook and Almac were doing although he added that there could be future potential to collaborate in diagnostics.
“We’ve been collaborating much more with academia.” he said. “For example, we established a drug discovery collaboration with Queen’s University a number of years ago which allowed us to get into the heart of the innovation hub within Queen’s; we seconded staff into the centre, so we were able to harness the innovation from academia with the rigour and speed of industrial project management to get the best of all worlds. Although we’re a small country, we have unique specialities. If we’re going to succeed against the global competition we have, we must work together and each of the sectors really must come together to punch above our weight.”
Frances Weldon added, “One of the places where we can bring those parties together is through our clinical trial infrastructure and through innovative clinical trials which allow the adoption of diagnostic tests to identify the right patients to develop new therapies focused on the results of those trials. That’s where both universities have a part to play, through the cancer centre located close to Queen’s and C-TRIC with the Ulster University.”
Mark Campbell pointed out that it was important to understand the industry was highly collaborative but that no company could do it on its own. “We currently have just under 40 national and international collaborations running across the world. Without that work you wouldn’t be able to achieve the breakthroughs that we do.” he said.
“We’ve been very fortunate in Northern Ireland in that there are a number of individuals that have had the drive, energy and the robustness to go out into the international global market place and succeed. But we mustn’t take anything for granted – we’ve got to protect the industry and we’ve got to look at how we keep it ahead of the global competitive marketplace.”
Concluding the interview, Wendy Austin asked the panel what problem they would most like to solve in the sector?
Tony Bjourson said,”The country or region that can develop and really win through in precision medicine area will dominate global health, diagnostics and the pharmaceutical centre for quite a number of years. That’s one of the reasons we established C-TRIC in Altnagelvin Hospital as a partnership for the Western Trust to bring the business community together with academics and clinicians – the three legs of the one stool need to be connected.”
Frances Weldon agreed, adding, “Research at Queen’s is being translated directly into patient benefits through partnership with industry, health and social care.”
Stephen Barr concluded, “The holy grail for me would be that we would invent our own drug and actually see it to market. At the moment that’s a pipedream because the investment required to develop a drug is over $1billion, but in the longer term we would really like to see those drugs being developed here, being sold through here and patients benefitting.”