Blair backs biotech plan for more UK drug trials

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the government would provide £10 million (AUD$16.9 million) to study ways to get more experimental medicines to patients through better and faster clinical trials.

The funding is an initial response to a report on Britain's biotechnology industry calling for the setting up of a clinical trials body to coordinate drug testing, which could benefit both patients and companies.

The proposed National Clinical Trials Agency would allow researchers working on novel medicines to take advantage of the unique single gateway that the National Health Service (NHS) provides to Britain's patient population. "This will create a powerful magnet for the bioscience sector and improve patient care," according to the report from Bioscience Innovation and Growth Team, a group of financiers, industrialists and researchers mandated by the government to look into ways of boosting UK biotech.

Blair, addressing the annual meeting of the Confederation of British Industry in Birmingham, said he would seriously consider the recommendations.

The suggested new agency would not conduct clinical tests itself but would make NHS-based studies more effective through a national network offering advice to researchers and companies.

The idea is the most radical of a number of recommendations designed to ensure the UK's pre-eminence in biotech by 2015. With 400 biotech firms employing more than 25,000 people, Britain is already a leader in Europe. But it lags well behind the United States, whose bigger biotech firms have recently emerged as predators.

PowderJect Pharmaceuticals, one of the UK's few profitable biotech firms, was acquired earlier this year by Chiron Corp of the United States. The largest, Celltech Group, which suffered a setback on a key drug last week, has also been tipped as a takeover target.

Player or payer?

Aisling Burnand, chief executive of the Bioindustry Association, said it was important for Britain to maintain a national biotechnology sector.

"We need to able to build a sustainable bioscience sector, because if we lost all of our industry abroad, we would no longer be a player but merely a payer, having to pay for products from other parts of the world," she said.

The report called for changes in financial arrangements for biotech companies, which with a 10-15 year timescale for product development, typically require several rounds of equity funding before reaching profitability.

At present, attempts to raise new cash are hampered by pre-emption guidelines, set by institutional investors, that require UK companies to seek the consent of existing shareholders for issues of more than five percent of capital.

This takes time and is public, often resulting in downward pressure on share prices.

As a result, the report's authors suggest an amendment to pre-emption guidelines to allow UK-listed life science companies to issue up to at least 20 per cent of their share capital on a non-pre-emptive basis over a three-year period.