At the IQVIA Westminster Life Sciences & NHS Summit 2025, senior leaders from government, industry, academia, and the NHS came together to confront a shared imperative: the UK must evolve from scientific excellence to system-wide implementation if it is to remain globally competitive. In a report published by policy institute Curia, the key messages from the meeting with Life Sciences Minister, Baroness Gillian Merron, are outlined.
A Defining Moment for UK Life Sciences
The UK’s standing as a leader in life sciences is at risk. While our scientific capability remains world-class, our ability to translate research breakthroughs into widespread adoption within the NHS is faltering. This was the starting point for the 2025 IQVIA Westminster Life Sciences & NHS Summit, which gathered stakeholders from across sectors under the Chatham House Rule to explore how the UK can reclaim its competitive edge and deliver for patients.
Opening the summit, there was a call for collaborative ambition around three foundational shifts set by the NHS: from hospital to community care, sickness to prevention, and analogue to digital. These themes underpinned a frank, forward-looking conversation on the future of innovation adoption in the UK.
Keynote Message: Ambition Backed by Action
The Government’s commitment to life sciences was underscored, emphasising regulatory reform, data access, and scaling innovation as national priorities. A clear message was communicated, the UK can still be the best place to develop and adopt transformational technologies – but only if we act with urgency.
System Readiness: Innovation Without Infrastructure is Futile
One core theme was the NHS’s limited preparedness for innovation. From GLP-1 therapies for obesity to digital tools for dementia and rare disease management, panellists agreed that the NHS often lacks the operational, cultural, and infrastructure foundations needed to adopt new technologies at pace.
Calls were made for the development of a national innovation readiness framework, investment in diagnostics and clinical capacity, and appointment of chief innovation officers in every NHS organisation. The message was clear: innovation must be embedded not only in policy, but in daily practice.
‘Ten for Number 10’: A Roadmap for Reform
The summit report, independently authored by Curia, presented 10 urgent recommendations for government. These include
- Making NHS adoption capability a national priority
- Reforming NICE cost-effectiveness thresholds to value long-term outcomes
- Accelerating regulatory alignment with global systems like the FDA
- Embedding local co-creation and prototyping frameworks to replace fragmented pilots
- Unlocking underutilised health data using NLP and AI for research and care delivery
Also notable was the proposal for a Sovereign Health Investment Fund, financed by a levy on ultra-processed food companies, to drive uptake of population-level interventions in areas like obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Rethinking Value: Innovation as a Catalyst, Not a Cost
A persistent challenge in the UK remains the framing of innovation as a short-term cost burden. Speakers emphasised that new medicines and HealthTech must be evaluated based on their ability to prevent disease, reduce long-term admissions, and improve economic productivity. This requires reform of Treasury and NHS budget systems to support whole-system investment thinking.
International examples of outcome-based commissioning were cited, but attendees noted the need for bespoke UK frameworks that reward real-world impact rather than procedural activity.
Scaling Success: From ‘Pilotitis’ to National Blueprints
Many at the summit criticised the prevalence of ‘pilotitis’ – short-term, unscalable innovation projects with no plan for national implementation. In contrast, Greater Manchester’s integrated approach to cardiometabolic care, underpinned by system-wide governance and co-investment, was highlighted as a replicable model. Attendees called for national structures to capture learning and provide toolkits for scale.
Regulation: Certainty Builds Confidence
Regulatory uncertainty remains a major barrier to investment. Industry stakeholders stressed that delays, misalignment between MHRA and NICE, and unclear frameworks for rare diseases are driving global innovators to deprioritise the UK.
Speakers called for a formal regulatory reliance model that would accept approvals from trusted global authorities, as well as deeper co-ordination between regulatory and reimbursement bodies. Reform of the NICE framework to accommodate complex, high-value therapies is essential to maintain the UK’s launch attractiveness.
Data: The Engine of Innovation
Data was described as both the UK’s greatest asset and most underused resource. With 80 per cent of NHS data currently unstructured, and 90 per cent of that never analysed, the need for natural language processing (NLP) tools and AI integration is urgent. Fragmented infrastructure and inconsistent data standards are holding back both research and personalised care.
The Health Data Research Service (HDRS) was welcomed, but participants urged faster implementation, better integration of regional nodes, and stronger safeguards to build public trust in data sharing.
Delivering Locally: Operationalising Collaboration
Local capacity emerged as a linchpin issue. National ambitions mean little without empowered integrated care systems (ICS) able to partner with innovators, co-create solutions and roll out new models of care. Summit attendees advocated for ICS-based innovation leads, joint funding mechanisms, and workforce development as critical enablers of place-based progress.
Final Thought: the Mandate is Clear
The IQVIA Summit left no doubt: the UK has the science, the vision, and the partnerships to lead in life sciences. What is needed now is delivery – across regulation, system reform, data infrastructure, and commissioning culture. As the summit report concludes, “The next five years will determine whether the UK can move from promise to practice. We must act, decisively and together.”
In that spirit, the summit’s final message was one of cautious optimism: if the recommendations are embraced and local systems are resourced to deliver, the UK can not only protect its leadership position – it can build a globally admired, innovation-ready NHS.
The full report is available for download at www.chamberuk.com/publications
