Medicines and healthcare

UK medicines and healthcare industries are in a strong international position both industrially and scientifically to generate significant revenues.

Given this strength, there is significant potential for government support through the Technology Strategy Board to leverage our world-class science and technology base and our major global presence in the (Bio)-pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors by stimulating the development of new technologies and consequent products and services.

The Technology Strategy Board has run 2 competitions to stimulate the science and technology base to address two challenges:

• The ‘Cell Therapy' competition announced in November 2007, encourages greater control of living cells for the purposes of regenerative healing. The competition offered an indicative £10 million, for projects which look to translate bioscience research into more robust methods for scale up/out, differentiation, manipulation or control of living cells either as a distinct device, process or on/at the body application e.g. smart bandage. 
  
• The ‘Technologies for Health' competition, promoted jointly with the Electronics and Photonics key technology area, seeks to encourage the development of better point-of-care diagnostics and improve genetic screening.  An indicative £15 million has been set aside for this initiative, which was launched in December 2007.

In addition the Technology Strategy Board is working with the Department of Health to stimulate the development, use and uptake of new technologies within the NHS.

Joint initiatives include the Healthcare Technology Co-operatives, developed under the Healthcare Industries Task Force (HITF) report. The co-operatives are designed to assess the feasibility of new innovations in healthcare technologies based in a clinical setting, bringing together businesses, the NHS, academic groups and patients.