Steve has over 30 years’ experience building world-class teams, products and companies in precision medicine, drug discovery and computational biology in the UK, EU and USA.
He has developed world-leading genomics, AI enabled drug discovery, precision medicine, and complex data analytics for life science, healthcare and clinical decision support including several patented inventions. He was Global Director of Research Informatics for Astra and involved in the early Human Genome project. He has worked with multiple pharma companies on 30+ drug discovery and development projects.
Steve is Chair of the UK BioIndustry Association’s Data, AI and Genomics Advisory Committee, Co-Chair of the Metrodora Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board, Expert in Residence at Oxford University, an Editorial Board member for AI in the Life Sciences and was on the Steering Committee of the UKCRC Tissue Directory & Coordination Centre. He advises a range of disease charities, national biobanks and research institutes on precision medicine strategy.
The old landscape of life science innovation is rapidly being transformed by the advent and adoption of new technologies. Lab-based medicinal chemistry went computational 30 years ago and this has given way in the last 5 years to generative AI. Sequencing of the human genome 25 years ago transformed the care of cancer, but more sophisticated molecular insights are now enabling us to unravel the more complex biology of chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s, long COVID and kidney failure, so highly detailed population scale patient data has become the new gold.
In healthcare, treating people when they become sick is recognized as being unaffordable and is giving way to earlier diagnosis and even the prediction and prevention of disease. Single ‘one-size-fits-all’ clinical pathways are changing to include personalization of treatment regimens using precision medicine approaches, even outside of oncology. The delivery of healthcare itself is moving out of the clinic into our homes and onto our phones and high streets.
All this is of course often enabled by one or other form of AI. The broad term ‘techbio’ has attempted to capture some of these transformative approaches, and encompasses a raft of new genomics, multi-omics, AI and precision medicine innovations. AI-led techbio systems are set to be at the heart of drug discovery, diagnostics and clinical care, encouraged by an enthusiastic and forward-looking government and their mandates to the civil service and health service providers.
These changes and the use of patient data to improve innovation and care models will be baked into the 10-year vision documents for the life sciences and the NHS that are scheduled for release in Q2 2025. These are very positive policy directions, but there are major challenges to overcome to deliver them and lots of competition. We’re not the only ones understanding the potential of this technology driven transformation and we’re in a race to develop it and deliver its benefits.
It's often said that the UK is uniquely positioned to take a leadership position in this new wave of healthcare innovation, but the potential for economic growth promised by this has not been realized yet. In many ways we’ve lost ground to the US, China and others, and this trend continues. We have many of the right ingredients, but there is a large and growing gap between the potential to exploit these and the reality of our ability to do so. Our ability to compete on a global stage is diminishing due to lack of homegrown investment, the relative scarcity of serially successful and well-networked investors and management teams, a raising of the bar in terms of how much capital is needed to compete, and the fact that our datasets are available to the world.
It remains true that we have some of the very best scientists, AI and tech innovators in the world, and that the lighthouse genomics projects of UK Biobank and now Our Future Health lead the world in the depth and breadth of data collected on the UK’s patient population. This potential will hopefully be cemented by initiatives to connect the NHS’s primary and secondary care data to genomics and other information.
We have so much talent and great innovation that major US companies and investors set up shop here to take advantage of our skill base. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison have set up major new longevity businesses in Cambridge and Oxford, Major US investors have set up alongside the Crick Institute in the Knowledge Quarter in London, but all too often this results in IP and talent leakage and redomiciling outside of the UK of those companies that do get funded.
So why isn’t the UK producing its own homegrown ecosystem of UK based, UK funded, globally competitive AI life science and AI healthcare companies? There are multiple reasons, but the main ones are unequal access to finance, a chronic underfunding of innovation, and the unintended consequences of sharing our data with the world on an apparently level playing field that in fact disadvantages relatively underfunded UK SMEs.
The Mansion House reforms are a major attempt to incentivize UK pension funds to reverse the trend of reducing investments in unlisted equities and aims to bring back £50 billion back into high-growth venture markets by 2030. There is however no special treatment for UK fund managers, nor a guaranteed flow of that capital into UK investments, and the effects have not yet been noticeable in early/growth stage funding. UK funds have and continue to struggle to raise follow-on funds, just as much as UK SMEs struggle to get funding from UK investors.
The US now consumes over 60% of global VC1. US AI businesses are raising billions of dollars of funding per round. In spite of this US Healthcare related startups actually raised the most money in January 2025, a staggering $9.4B in a single month1. For comparison, the entirety of the UK life sciences venture in the whole of 2024 (early and late stage) was worth just $2.6B2.
The UK is still ranked the fourth best place to launch an AI company, behind the US, China and Singapore, although this is down from third in 2019 and we’re now neck and neck with the next 5 countries. This is likely to change – there are massive sovereign wealth backed investments being made in establishing leadership in applications of AI, led by healthcare. The US announced the $500B Stargate Initiative to expand AI infrastructure3 and the EU retaliated with its own $210B AI investment initiative4. The Chinese government invested around $520B in AI companies in 20235 and just created a new $8B AI investment fund6. In contrast the UK announced £83M support for 3 cancer AI projects7. Welcome though this support is, it’s obviously on a vastly different scale to the competition UK companies will face.
At the same time, availability of venture funds in the UK has become bimodal – we have a lot of Seed funds doing very small cheques, and a few very large deals do get done, usually led by international funders. Accessing growth capital in the UK has become a major problem even in AI and healthcare, and Series A rounds in particular have become incredibly slow and hard to syndicate.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, where UK and EU new drug approvals have been static at around 10-15 per year for 25 years, the US has doubled from 15 to 30 in that time, and China has gone from 4 newly approved drugs in 2018 to 25 (35% of the total) in 20248. Why has China become so good at developing novel drugs? There are a number of reasons: regulatory reforms, returning talent, industrial evolution, availability of large-scale datasets, and venture funding.
Over the last 3 years, US and EU pharma have refocused away from early-stage R&D due to the Inflation Reduction Act and a forthcoming patent cliff, meaning that there are fewer partners and an oversupply of early/mid-stage assets. This has made lucrative pharma deals much harder to do outside of late-stage asset licensing. The bar for both pharma and VCs to do deals has become “do you have clinical validation?” This is an unrealistically high bar to achieve without £20M+ in funding for most companies. While this level of funding is readily achievable in the US, it has become much harder in the UK.
We’ve also shared access to our patient datasets with the world in a piece of inspirational global collaboration and soft power projection. This truly changed the way the world looks at using its healthcare systems as a source of high-quality, prospective longitudinal patient data. However, most of the patents now filed based on the use of UK Biobank data go to US and Chinese companies, and the proportion of publications is similar. As recently as 2021 the UK made up 40% of the 2,000 papers published using UK Biobank data. In 2024 that number had dropped to just 18% of 5,000 papers published. While we’ve been essentially static, the US and especially China has expanded massively in just 3 years to fill the gap.
Other countries and regions are catching up on data access quickly – for example the US with All of Us, Finland with FinnGen and Singapore’s PRECISE cohorts. The Gulf region is leading to bring together its national genomics programmes integrated into primary and secondary care records in a precision and preventative medicine framework that will be rolled out to whole populations. We still have leadership in data collection – UK Biobank has 15 years of longitudinal patient data, and Our Future Health is rapidly becoming the major UK genomics resource, planning to have 5 million UK patients enrolled by 2025.
Unfortunately, because of how it was funded, Our Future Health’s annual access fees are set at a point that is unaffordable for the majority of UK SMEs, but are well within scope for better funded US and Chinese companies. The unintended consequence is that effectively unequal access to UK patient data will create a competitive disadvantage for UK SMEs and enable foreign companies to exploit these resources. This risks another backlash from the UK public over profiteering from the sale of their data to foreign companies, which would threaten the development of a modern data driven NHS, especially in context of delivering primary care.
Key takeaway from this Blog:
Without proactively recognizing and solving for these problems, we’re actually making the situation worse for UK SMEs. UK companies will increasingly struggle to maintain a veneer of competitiveness on a global stage without the capital to compete. The disadvantage posed by inadequate capital is simply too overwhelming now to remain competitive, and we risk losing the race to build and integrate AI solutions in a way that we cannot recover.
This has major consequences for the NHS and government policy. An innovative homegrown UK ecosystem working with UK patients and the NHS is absolutely essential to support the NHS and its patients and deliver the transformation to healthy aging and the planned for benefits in the 10-year vision. We cannot afford to have to buy back full price AI solutions that were built on NHS patient data and innovations that UK taxpayers have subsidized, from much better funded US/China tech giants – but we’re in danger of building exactly that future.
Delivering UK based innovations in healthcare is essential and massively valuable – one additional year of health for the citizens of the UK could be worth £1 trillion or more per year to the UK economy9,10, more than enough to pay for the NHS many times over and reducing the productivity underperformance hanging over our economy.
So, what can we do to redress some of these disadvantages and deliver the benefits promised? Short of finding £50B for an AI fund, there are 3 interconnected recommendations that would immediately and significantly change the competitive landscape for UK SMEs:
- Bring together a £250M fund from the National Wealth Fund and British Business Bank, perhaps via Innovate UK, to provide much needed growth capital that can cornerstone and provide a UK anchor for investment into Series A and B UK AI life sciences and/or healthcare businesses looking to raise £10M-£30M rounds.
- Establish a service to facilitate connections between vetted UK SMEs with the potential to be high-growth and globally competitive and a broad range of global investors including US VC, UK pension funds and family offices, with meaningful financial incentives to back UK based businesses.
- Provide subsidized access to NHS / UK patient data for UK businesses (for example using Innovate UK to provide vouchers to defray subscription costs for UK SMEs), and impose preferential royalties/commercial terms on UK based businesses on the global income for products that incorporate or have used NHS patient data in their development.
1 Crunchbase News Feb 2 2025 US Still Dominated Venture Funding In January
2 UK biotech financing 2024 https://biotechfinance.org/
3 Trump's AI Push: Understanding The $500 Billion Stargate Initiative
4 EU launches €200 billion AI investment initiative | Scientific Computing World
5 China's AI Industry Saw $521 Billion in Total Funding - China Internet Watch
6 Tech war: China create US$8.2 billion AI investment fund amid tightened US trade control | South China Morning Post
7 UK-backed AI companies to transform British cancer care and spark new drug breakthroughs - GOV.UK
8 Will all our drugs come from China? | Alex's blog quoting data from Citeline 2024 & Scrip, EFPIA & PWC
9 An extra year of healthy life is worth £5 trillion - UKRI
10 Scott, A.J., Ellison, M. & Sinclair, D.A. The economic value of targeting aging. Nat Aging 1, 616-623 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-021-00080-0