Golden future for MedTech
Growth in the UK medical technology sector is gathering pace with three centres of excellence leading the push. Why is more not being made of this great British success story,
The UK is on course to become the world’s biggest innovator in medical technology outside of the United States. Only a few years ago, that statement may have seemed fanciful but a rise in investment in the sector since the Covid pandemic has put it on a path to unprecedented growth.
Collaboration between industry and leading UK universities in the so-called ‘golden triangle’ of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, has created a dynamic focus for creativity which could see the UK outstrip Germany and Japan as the world’s second biggest hub for MedTech development.
The UK medical equipment market is currently worth around $30billion-ayear, compared with £31.7billion in Japan and $35.8billion in Germany. All are dwarfed by the US sector, which generated $176.7bn in 2020.
While most of the focus in recent years has been on the growth of UK Biopharma – which has a turnover of £40.7bn – core MedTech is now primed to challenge it as the country’s leading life science sector.
The biggest driver of growth is undoubtedly the region between Oxford and Cambridge, which contributes £111bn in gross value added to the economy every year.
asks Ivor Campbell
According to a recent report by the local enterprise partnership, that could reach up to £274bn-a-year, with the support of an integrated housebuilding and transport programme.
A snapshot of the growing influence of the UK is seen in the work Snedden Campbell does in placing candidates with companies in the sector. Shortlists for senior executive positions globally are now dominated by British-based applicants. That wasn’t the case as recently as five years ago.
The growth in flexible and remote working, following the pandemic, has made geographical location of staff less relevant than in the past.
A decade ago, you would expect a UK shortlist for senior MedTech executive positions to have up to 30% non-UK based candidates. Now it’s invariably 100% UK-based.
With a worldwide remit – and we’re looking for a CEO at the moment –we can produce a decent selection of candidates from people who are entirely in the UK. Not necessarily Brits, but certainly people who are resident in the UK.
The golden triangle is home to four of the world’s 10 best universities for healthcare – Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, and University College London (UCL) – and
in the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Europe’s largest centre for medical research and health science in Europe.
Cambridge also houses AstraZeneca’s new global headquarters, which will house 2,000 workers it is completed, as well as the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the heart of Britain’s genomic-sequencing work.
The ‘Oxford cluster’, meanwhile, includes the Jenner Institute – which developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine – the Harwell science park, and gene-sequencing equipment manufacturer Oxford Nanopore, one of the largest firms to emerge from the UK’s life-sciences ecosystem.
Snedden Campbell now places more senior science professionals in Cambridge alone than it previously did in the whole of the UK, according to its chief executive.
Cambridge has come from almost nowhere in diagnostics, six or seven years ago, to being dominant in what we do.
The university, the local authority and national government have been able to put an infrastructure together. It’s easy to get to, it’s not a bad place to be and London is nearby.
With London doing the money and Oxford and Cambridge doing the science, we have the infrastructure for a globally dominant sector.
Having one of the business capitals of the world close to two major science bases, is getting close to the ideal. You get the symbiosis that Massachusetts gets being close to New York.”
British universities keep appearing in the world’s top 50 universities and they produce some very good people indeed, who go on to do Masters’ and PhDs in the UK. It’s certainly the case that the big UK science universities are producing the kind of people that everyone from early stage to big corporate scientific and engineering
organisations want to hire.
It’s particularly interesting the number of start-ups in Cambridge launched by people who have been to Cambridge University at some stage and hiring people who were also students there. While this isn’t America and we are still short of at least a zero on investment numbers, we do have a pretty strong base of people starting businesses up who have got a fighting chance of getting somewhere. Breakthrough drugs developed in the UK over the past year include lecanemab which slows the rate of decline in memory and thinking in people with early Alzheimer’s disease in what is being described as a “historic moment” for dementia treatment. The cognition of Alzheimer’s patients given the drug declined by 27% less than those on a placebo treatment after 18 months. This is a modest change in clinical outcome but it is the first time any drug has been clearly shown to alter the disease’s trajectory.
Ivor Campbell is Chief Executive of Callander-based Snedden Campbell, a specialist recruitment consultant for the medical technology industry
With London doing the Money and Oxford and Cambridge doing the science, we have the infrastructure for a globally dominant sector
