Joyce Tait contributed to the assessment of the regulatory landscape for the life sciences sector in the ‘Pro-Innovation Regulation of Technologies Review’, which was presented by Professor Dame Angela McLean, the new UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to HM Government.
The review makes a series of recommendations to overcome barriers to innovation and getting emerging technologies to market in the life sciences sectors. These include:
- Creating a skills pipeline across regulators whose remits cover life sciences to build expertise in the long term;
- Allowing data sharing across different parts of the regulatory system;
- Supporting regulators to engage with innovative technologies;
- Setting timelines for regulatory approval that are in line with international best practice;
- Ensuring that domestic routes for approval of therapeutics and devices are predictable, transparent and proportionate;
- Utilising the expertise within existing regulatory bodies to create an Engineering Biology Regulatory Network (EBRN);
- Accelerating reform of the approval process for Novel Foods;
- Updating the waste valorisation hierarchy to secure feedstocks for engineering biology companies.
The Government response has mainly accepted the report’s recommendations and sets out further detail on its position and implementation plans.
The full report can be found here
Read the Government’s response to the recommendations here
“The report’s analysis and recommendations pave the way for more effective innovation pathways and will speed up the development of novel therapies, devices, foods and manufactured materials so the UK becomes more globally competitive in these sectors. My contributions to the report’s recommendations relied heavily on the research conducted by the Innogen institute in the area of regulation/innovation interactions since 2002.” said Prof. Joyce Tait, Founding Director of the Innogen Institute at The University of Edinburgh.