ON eNews
February 2021
Leadership, Adventures and Connecting in Uncertainty Welcome to this month’s One Nucleus eNews and we hope everyone is staying safe and productive as plans for the year ahead start playing out, albeit with still a high degree of uncertainty. Uncertainty remains order of the day of course as the pandemic continues its disruption both close to home and around the globe. There remain huge challenges although encouragement can be taken from the positive news that keeps emerging also. The effectiveness of the rapidly developed vaccines, the deployment of sequencing to identify variants for effective surveillance of the evolution and the lessons learned around measures to work and live more safely are all contributing to current successes in the sector. It was excellent to see the Mike Ward analysis of investment in the sector in both the DRG Report and within the BIA’s UK review showing how record levels of investment have flowed into our industry. Investment is an exciting headline, but the growth and successes in the drug development pipelines, R&D Services, R&D collaborations, Digital Health and Med Tech across numerous therapy and technology areas has been amazing all round and should be celebrated. Much of the news from our members will be posted on our news feed or on the LinkedIn and Twitter timelines of One Nucleus or our staff. One Nucleus plans for 2021 are coming together at speed as we aim to continue the effective support of our members, create the right forums for peer-to-peer learning and network building. All the plans having flexibility built in to accommodate the changing landscape. In this welcome, I will touch upon some of those plans by way of a heads up for our readers with more details on some of them later in this edition. We were delighted with the enthusiasm and engagement in the launch event of our Virtual Innovation Centre. A great turnout and engaging panel discussion framing the introduction to the initiative. We have also launched our ‘Building Life Science Adventures’ conference. This is taking place over 30th-31st March 2021, consisting of a series of online panel discussions focussing on what is good practice on attracting, developing and retaining great staff. Equally, those building their careers will hear what employers need from them and how they can acquire the skills to take the opportunities our sector holds. I am delighted so many organisations have already signed up to sponsor or support the event, illustrating their commitment to their brand and desire to be an employer of choice both individually and as a sector if we want to attract the best people. This week will also see registration open for our annual ON Helix conference. Whilst like many of our network we are keen to return to physical events as soon as it is feasible, but the safety of our attendees and value in their attending must come first. For these reasons, we feel it is best at this stage to plan for ON Helix to be a fully digital event. The experience of last year tells us this can be highly effective and valuable to all, so I am confident that will again be the case. By way of thanking our members for their support through the pandemic, each One Nucleus