Forming part of the latest document published by the Office for Life Sciences – Life Sciences 2010: Delivering the Blueprint, the UK government has launched a Life Sciences Super Cluster, backed by £1m of funding, to bring together industry, academia and the NHS to deliver the next generation of medicines and technologies to patients with chronic diseases.
This announcement comes a year after the government’s Office for Life Sciences launched The Life Sciences Blueprint, which was published in July 2009.
The Blueprint set out a series of measures to ensure that innovation is at the heart of healthcare delivery in the UK. This included the launch of a pilot Innovation Pass in November 2009, to make selected innovative medicines that have not yet been appraised by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), available on the NHS to patients with rare diseases.
Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Lord Mandelson said: “The government has demonstrated that we are prepared to take real action to support Life Sciences and this is already having an impact on investment decisions, but this is just the beginning. We will maintain this momentum and continue to build a thriving environment for UK Life Science.”
The Life Sciences Super Cluster will commence with a pilot later this year in immunology and inflammation, which will concentrate on disease areas such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma.
Commenting on this latest announcement, Health Secretary Andy Burnham said: “Last month I set out a plan to reshape the NHS in the first half of this new decade – to innovate at every level to meet the challenge of delivering preventative, people-centred care, that is also high-quality and highly productive. Working together with academia and industry, the NHS is championing new treatments, techniques and technologies to do this.”