The head of one of the UK Medicines Manufacturing Centres of Excellence has said a recent Parliamentary report criticising life sciences policy has itself failed to highlight a key challenge for the sector.
Professor Ivan Wall, co-director of Resilience, said the House of Lords select committee on science and technology report had made a “vital contribution” to the wider debate.
However, it had failed to highlight the need to train the next generation required to work in the sector.
“It’s not enough to invest in buildings and equipment; we need future generations of trained, motivated, and educated young people to work in the sector,” warned Wall.
“That means seriously assessing the need for investment in tools that improve productivity, and it means raising awareness of the many hundreds of career choices in life sciences. Finally, it means we need to excite and engage those young people to choose them.”
Of the UK Medicines Manufacturing Centres of Excellence, Resilience is specifically responsible for providing training and outreach programmes, with its counterpart the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre focused on manufacturing innovation.
The £4.5 million, two-year programme run by Innovate UK with partners including UCL and Heriot-Watt University has since last year provided training activities for 15,000 individuals.
But Wall expressed his disappointment that the Lords’ critical report on Government delivery for the UK life sciences “made a vital contribution to the debate around the UK’s viability to realise its full potential in this key area but not workforce preparation” while omitting to highlight better the need for better training.
“It makes no sense to encourage investment without in parallel growing a workforce that is educated, trained, and experienced,” he warned.
“In recent years, training technologies have made significant ground. For example, in the life sciences sector, we can recreate real-world environments using advanced VR technology, such that students can learn valuable skills that it would be impractical, expensive, and disruptive to learn in real labs.”
Wall, professor of Regenerative Medicine at Resilience partner the University of Birmingham, added that the number of “future medicine makers” reached by the centre of excellence in just two years had been “astounding”.
Two thirds of those in its leadership accelerator programme are female with nearly half of all entrants coming from BAME backgrounds.
Besides Birmingham, other Resilience partners include University College London (UCL), Teesside University, Heriot-Watt University and Sci-Tech Daresbury-based consultancy Britest.
Pic: Martin Lopez