UK Diagnostics Industry and Covid-19 Recovery — House of Commons, 2022-05-10
Topic: Health
James Neale Hanvey (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): How can such a basic statistic be commercially sensitive? No one is asking for information about the companies. I am certainly not asking for information about how contracts were awarded. I am merely asking for the number of Government-procured tests that were manufactured in the United Kingdom—not assembled, not put in boxes, but manufactured. It is a really important point Further back, on 8 April 2020, another tweet from Lord Bethell read: "We’re backing a new business consortium, including @UniofOxford, to rapidly develop a home-grown, reliable antibody testing kit to determine whether people have developed immunity after overcoming the virus" Perhaps the Minister can tell me what the total amount of the Government’s investment has been in the domestic sector, and what has been the success to date. What volume of products has been made available by SureScreen to the NHS? When will the Government invest at the scale necessary to allow biomedical research to flourish and prosper, and successfully underpin effective partnerships among business, academia and the NHS Another important part of the issue is biomedical research. Before the 2020 autumn statement, there was a Westminster Hall debate about the Association of Medical Research Charities’ proposal for a life sciences partnership fund to help charitable research and sustain it through the pressures of the drop in covid funding. It would have been a drop in the ocean for the Government: £300 million was needed to sustain that research. There was cross-party support, and many of the medics on the Government Benches came and spoke passionately about the need to sustain the research portfolio, but the Government did not put in what was asked. There might have been £10 million in there—I could not say for sure—but that does not meet the needs of the research community The Academy of Medical Sciences has underlined the value of biomedical research and its importance to the economy and health of the population. Its campaign "What's it worth?" has concluded: "Every £1 invested in medical research delivers a return equivalent to around 25p every year, for ever"— so there is a 100% recovery from the investment within four short years, and we continue to accumulate value thereafter. The Academy of Medical Sciences is calling on the Government to invest 3% of GDP in research and development, setting 2.4% by 2027 as an intermediate goal. Will the Minister commit to seriously considering that request from this important and prestigious organisation One charity working in the research space, Action for ME, has said: "Collaborating with the M.E. community could further support UK diagnostics research in their pursuit of tackling Long Covid", because there are clinical similarities between long covid and ME, and there is a real opportunity for further research in both fields I want to talk about the future. The rest of the world is planning a 10-year strategy to deal with the novel virus covid and its further mutations. The US has effectively cornered the lateral flow device market from the east—a very clear explanation of the difficulty that we had in the winter in securing lateral flow devices and probably PCRs. But covid is not the only novel virus that we could have to deal with, particularly as a result of global warming. Novel viruses and variants of Ebola and dengue fever are possible, and it is therefore important for us to have testing and diagnostic equipment that is sensitive to all those different eventualities. What we cannot do is ignore surveillance, which must be robust and effective. Testing and surveillance are the answer when it comes to protecting the nation from further lockdowns I have spoken to two innovative companies. I will not go into detail about them, but one is in Scotland and the other in England. Their technology and expertise could be lost to the United States because the United Kingdom Government are dragging their heels over their support for the domestic diagnostics sector. AI tests are particularly sensitive, and can be tailored to all these novel viruses. Once a profile is available, it can be deployed very swiftly. A new variant can be put into the system, the sensitivity to it can be built up, and the tests can then be deployed. However, that intellectual property is now at risk of being taken out of the country because the United States is so interested in the technology. That illustrates how important it is to value the science community that has got us out of a very nasty scrape It is clear to the industry that the UK is not preparing for any future pandemic. I myself am not convinced that the Government have learned any lessons from the current pandemic, and I do not know how they would incorporate such lessons in their planning for future pandemics. I know that some surveillance is taking place at the border, but it is not clear to me or, I think, to any other Members what that actually looks like. Are the Government considering implementing civil contingency planning and attaching it to a ministerial portfolio with responsibility to report regularly to the House and to Select Committees? Are Ministers being provided with civil contingency training and the decisions they must take confidently during any future pandemic The industry is focusing on how to establish a playbook of recommendations in the case of a future pandemic, and the UK Government must pay attention to the industry. It also hopes that the UK regulations for medical devices and diagnostics currently in development are flexible enough to cover emergency situations, so that we do not see a return to ad hoc regulations such as those on emergency use authorisation and coronavirus test device approvals, and to a distorted playing field. Mechanisms such as statutory instruments that put barriers in the way of the domestic diagnostics sector are damaging the sector and impeding its progress There is a need to find a way through these barriers, fostering new ways of working and ultimately finding solutions. That, surely, is what we all want to see. Realising the UK’s ambition to be a scientific superpower depends on valuing the scientific community. The future health of whole populations, both in the UK and abroad, relies on this investment. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) pointed out earlier, the domestic diagnostics sector is vital to tackling the NHS backlog, in relation to not just cancer but a range of other diseases. It is important for that capacity to be built up and ready to be deployed. The success of the UK diagnostics industry is critical to achieving all of this, and there is a huge potential for UK companies to break into international markets with novel approaches and new emerging technologies that will benefit patients at home and abroad, as well as exporting intellectual know-how There is no point in our crossing our fingers and hoping that covid has gone away. New variants are lurking in the background and they could strike at any time. We must have the diagnostic capacity to be able to switch on, almost immediately, both genomic and epidemiological surveillance.