British bioscientists are tackling some of the biggest
challenges facing the planet.
How to make clean energy, how to develop
the next generation of medicines,
and how to prevent disease.
But some on the front line are worried
about the future of their research,
especially after Brexit.
I think it's no secret that universities are really not
in favour of Brexit.
As a company now, over half of all of our team
are from outside of the UK.
If the funding becomes UK national only,
that will restrict our ability to expand our work.
The main problem, at least, for my work, is regulations.
We don't know what's going to happen.
I'm going to examine the health of an industry that generates
£70bn a year for the UK economy and employs almost a quarter
of a million people across the country.
But first... that's interesting.
Red.
I suppose it's all the cheese in it.
This is personalised shopping with a difference.
I'm a sucker for both of those.
Yes, I can go with the chickpeas.
I may be shopping in a London supermarket.
But I'm also trying out the latest high-tech weapon
in the fight against the big killer
diseases in modern society.
The device I'm using is synced with an app on my phone, which
is matched to my DNA.
It can tell me if I'm at risk of obesity, hypertension,
or even Type 2 diabetes.
And more than that it can tell me
which foods are likely to increase these risks
and nudge me towards healthier alternatives in real time.
Its inventor, Chris Toumazou, is onhand
to explain why the app is happy for me
to buy some foods but not others.
Huh.
Red
The other one I picked out of the bars was this Snickers.
And that's green.
Okay, Mars out, Snickers in.
Yes.
And let's see why.
Mars bar--
Mars has got 60 grammes of sugar.
Choo!
That was bounding.
Whereas Snickers...
Has got...
44 grammes.
So nearly 15 grammes more sugar.
So, in fact, you were quite low with things
like your obesity gene.
Things like fats, you were quite low with.
So effectively, you are being nudged
towards things that are a lot more
appropriate for your heart.
Putting personal health in the hands of shoppers
could help prevent chronic diseases
that cost the NHS billions.
But so far, few products like DnaNudge
have made it out of UK labs and onto the market.
After the United States, Britain produces
more cited life sciences research
than anywhere else in the world.
But in 2017, the UK ranked 12th out of 18 comparable countries
in the value of its medical technology exports.
Science and innovation clusters across the country
are trying to change that.
Imperial College's White City campus is the latest example.
It covers 23 acres of west London and cost £2bn.
We face huge problems in society at the moment.
Huge global challenges.
And the idea of this campus is to bring different people
together.
Bringing together different cultures obviously
brings together a diversity of thinking.
And it's only with that international linking
and collaboration that we'll solve these problems.
With that in mind, how do you view the prospect of Brexit?
I think it's no secret that universities are really not
in favour of Brexit.
We're really worried that the students will no longer come
from Europe because they bring a fantastic intellectual
dimension.
You know, without these brilliant young students
from Europe, I think we'll be a lesser place.
The ultimate goal is to get researchers and businesses
working on the next generation of products together.
This lab and office space for start-ups.
Sixfold Bioscience is just one of 70 companies
already on campus.
So, we are a biotechnology company
developing novel drug delivery systems for cell gene
therapeutics.
And what you can see here today is our R and D team.
Sixfold is working on new ways to deliver therapies
that will fight diseases like cancer, by fixing faulty genes
or reprogramming living cells.
So if we add more of this protein to these cells,
we can increase the efficacy of our drug delivery.
Thank you.
The scientists on their team get to use
cutting edge equipment at Imperial's NMR lab
and measurement suite.
But more than that, the cluster gives Sixfold's founders
the opportunity to rub shoulders with entrepreneurs, funders,
and potential collaborators.
For you personally, as founders of a biotech company, what
does the opportunity to interact with all these people,
what does it give you?
Just having a great space to do science,
to execute on the science, then to discuss
that with your peers.
They want to come and meet us.
We want to meet them.
And I think it's really a good place to do that.
What we are also allowed to do is actually
share our experience with people that
are even earlier during the entrepreneurial journey.
To share our struggles and hopefully allow other companies
to progress even faster and have a smoother journey.
It goes further than just having companies.
There's a lot of academics and there's
a lot of larger pharma companies that are also in the area.
That makes it a unique environment,
I would say, within London.
And, of course, it's a very international space
for an international company, as you are.
Do you see any threats to that internationalism?
As a company now, over half of all of our team
are from outside of the UK.
We also work a lot with people in the US,
with other areas of academic excellence.
And maybe the government could be
forced into a position to making it easier for those people
to come to work here.
And that's something I think is maybe a potential avenue
or opportunity for us.
The number of new start-ups across all industries in the UK
fell by 12.8 per cent in 2018.
And researchers blamed economic uncertainty caused by Brexit.
On average, London start-ups have fared better
than those in other parts of the country.
But even here, the government has
been keen to help new life sciences
businesses find their feet.
That's because the field is so specialised.
It is immensely difficult, actually,
to find the right research expertise,
the right operational infrastructure,
and the right types of patients to recruit
into clinical studies.
MedCity was launched five years ago
to help businesses find collaborators in industry,
academia, and government.
The project is co-funded by the mayor of London.
London is proud to host the largest investor
base in Europe, and some of the best universities in the world.
But of course there's a little bit, tiny, whiney economic
and political uncertainty in the country at the moment.
But I want to take this moment to say to all of you
that I remain very, very confident.
Come what may, London will continue
to thrive as a great city in which to do business.
I think in a post-Brexit world that it's even more important
that we focus on some of these sectors.
And I remain fully confident of London's future and UK's future
in life sciences.
It's the innovation, the entrepreneurship,
that has kept London going.
There is political uncertainty.
But I think what we're seeing is that the interest of industry
coming to London and the greater south-east
is really borne out of the strength
of the scientific excellence and talent there is.
And that definitely is not changing.
UK-based biotech companies attracted £2.2bn of investment
in 2018, almost twice what they managed in 2017.
In the same year, foreign direct investment in UK life sciences
more generally reached £1.1bn, the highest it's been
in the past eight years.
But there are warnings from some of Britain's top research
institutions.
The scientific excellence that's so attractive for investors
could be under threat.
The Francis Crick Institute is Britain's biggest bioscience
lab.
It has 1,200 staff.
And scientists here come from over 70 countries.
We couldn't really be closer to continental Europe
than the Crick.
What does that mean to you, personally?
I suppose personally, being a French citizen,
I can jump in the Eurostar in 10 minutes,
and I'm in the train two and a half hours,
I'm in central Paris.
So it allows us to really get people from France,
but also close by Belgium, Netherlands now, and Germany.
Seventy per cent of my lab are non-British.
But in general, I think the proportion
in the whole institution is probably more than 50
per cent and with a high majority of EU
citizenship from laboratory support technicians
to group leaders.
What about international funding, particularly EU
funding?
What would happen if we were cut off from that?
In 2018, I think the institute altogether
get 12m euros from the EU or its own framework.
If the funding becomes UK national only,
that will restrict our ability to expand our work.
The UK's annual share of EU research funding
has fallen by almost a third, or 400m euros since 2015.
And there's been an almost 40 per cent drop
in British applications to one of Europe's biggest funding
schemes, Horizon 2020.
Many researchers feel the prospect of Brexit
is already having an impact on their work.
Ana, we don't know what's going to happen with Brexit.
No.
But what are the effects that you're
afraid of if it goes badly?
The main problem, at least for my work, is regulations.
We don't know what's going to happen.
But in the event of a hard Brexit,
where there is no agreement between the rest of Europe
and the UK, if I'm trying to run a multinational trial,
for example, how can I do it if there is no agreement in that
for sharing?
How can I develop a medical device
within the UK regulations if I don't
know that Europe will accept the UK regulations and vice-versa?
Changes to regulation could be particularly problematic
for fields like cell and gene therapy,
where scientists use the patient's own cells
to develop a living treatment just for them.
To give an idea of how rigorous the process is,
we filmed in Stevenage, some 30 miles north of London,
at the manufacturing centre of the Cell and Gene Therapy
Catapult.
The cells arrive at the centre by special courier and are
signed off before they can be taken inside.
Once logged, they're cross-checked before
the package can even be opened.
More paperwork before they can be transferred to cryostorage.
They're signed out and checked again
before being taken into the lab.
Nothing gets in without being cleaned and prepped.
Only now can the scientists get to work.
In real time, this whole sequence of events
takes place over days or weeks.
And it's only a small part of the process.
The clinical trial phase, testing, and final delivery
of cell and gene therapies are all
governed by strict rules and regulations.
To develop any new treatment is a huge undertaking.
There is no other ecosystem for developing this end
to end anywhere else in the world that's
really as far on as we are.
And that's not just because we've addressed
the manufacturing issues.
It's because we've also simultaneously looked
at how the regulatory system was reformed.
The approval times have gone down from over a year
to under 60 days to get into clinical trial.
And we've seen several products already start in the NHS,
and start to be used really early.
And that's kind of unheard of.
The UK already is a world leader in these therapies.
And providing that we can keep reinforcing investment,
it will continue to be a world leader in these therapies.
Cell and gene therapy is expected to become a £2bn
industry in the UK by 2025, supplying a global market that
could be worth almost £10bn by then.
Right now, Europe is by far the biggest
market for UK medicines.
More than 40 per cent of our medicinal products
go to EU countries.
If Brexit limits our access to that market,
it could leave the life sciences vulnerable.
Yet, industry leaders are keen to see
the opportunities in Brexit as well as the challenges.
The best and worst case scenarios
for UK life science in the coming years, I think
are more dependent on what happens globally
than be seeing solely through the prism of Brexit.
If the Chinese market opens up and Shanghai
becomes a source of capital for UK businesses,
that would be fantastic.
If Nasdaq continues to have the experience in the next five
years it's had in the last five, that would be fantastic.
Those, for me, are the global parameters into which the UK
sector will succeed and fail.
Brexit and the outcome of Brexit plays a small part
within those global perspectives.
The life sciences sector relies on talent and funding
from overseas.
It depends on streamlined regulation and easy access
to international markets.
It is also at the heart of the UK economy.
How it performs after Brexit could
be a guide for other industries and even
for the country as a whole.