UK must spend more on medicines, minister says, as Big Pharma cuts investment

By Alistair Smout

LONDON (Reuters) -Britain needs to reverse its declining spend on medicines, science minister Patrick Vallance said on Tuesday, after two major pharmaceutical firms cancelled or paused investments and the industry warned of a difficult operating environment.

U.S. drugmaker Merck & Co, known as MSD in Europe, last week said it was scrapping research operations in London, while Reuters reported that AstraZeneca had paused a 200 million pound ($273 million) investment in Cambridge.

The pharmaceutical industry has been outspoken about what it says is Britain's underinvestment in life sciences, criticising its system for valuing medicines, known as NICE.

Its talks with the government over how much revenue from drug sales must be returned to the country's National Health Service have also stalled.

Vallance, who worked at GlaxoSmithKline before serving as Britain's Chief Scientific Adviser during the COVID pandemic, told a parliamentary committee hearing that appropriate access and payment for medicines was a "crunch issue" which "was causing an environment which the industry is finding difficult in the UK".

"I think there will be an increased percentage of NHS spend on medicines," he told lawmakers, adding he was "deeply concerned that there's been a 10-year decrease in the investment and support for a vital industry".

"The reason that I think we need to reverse that direction is not just price ... It's about saying we need to make sure that we get rapid uptake with the best new medicines."

On Tuesday, U.S. drugmaker Bristol Myers Squibb said that a "challenging access environment" in Britain had led it to halve the size of its local operation over the last four years.

Ben Lucas, VP Managing Director UK and Ireland at MSD, told the committee that the "commercial operating environment does need to be addressed", while AstraZeneca UK President Tom Keith-Roach said that the current dispute over drug pricing was a symptom rather than a cause of the problem.

"In the long term, this needs to be a country which is committed to investing in innovation, to making innovation available to patients and providing a front door through to the NHS through which innovative medicines can pass," he said.

($1 = 0.7324 pounds)

(Reporting by Alistair Smout. Additional reporting by Maggie Fick. Editing by Mark Potter)