"Life Sci for Growth" Leads to UK Centre of Excellence for Medicine Manufacturing

An agile and responsive skills system is one which is able to forecast skills gaps in critical technologies (academia, industry, Government and the third sector) and the actions which are required to fill these gaps, resulting in a world-class workforce within the STEM sectors which can respond to future health emergencies.

The Centre of Excellence is intended to build on existing infrastructure and best practices to deliver sustainable end-to-end training provision.

As part of this strategy, the UK must maintain its current competitiveness in the ongoing global competition to attract international talent; the UK is home to 4 of the world's top 10 universities and offers a 'high-skilled visa system' aimed to facilitate entry into the UK.

It can often be challenging for SMEs to access the NHS market, as attempting to introduce innovative products requires rigorous testing and clinical trials before these can be adopted.

In an effort to reduce the regulatory burden of approving clinical trials, in order to bring new healthcare products onto the market and to patients more quickly, the Government has committed £121m of the fund towards improving commercial clinical trials and improving access to real-time data via new Clinical Trial Acceleration Frameworks.

We expect further detail with respect to the Centre of Excellence (and the application process for businesses interested in obtaining funding) to be published by Innovate UK in the run-up to the official launch, but for the time being, the Government's announcement describes its aims in committing to investing in the UK's Life Sciences sector.