Report prepared by PM Life Sciences Consulting | May 2026

Overview
In July 2025 the UK Government published its Life Sciences Sector Plan as a ten-year industrial strategy for one of the country’s flagship sectors. In it, they set out how Government intends to harness UK science and innovation to drive economic growth, attract investment and improve health outcomes. The Plan positions life sciences as a cornerstone of the wider industrial strategy, with a clear ambition to make the UK Europe’s leading life sciences economy by 2030 and the third globally by 2035. It outlines a package of targeted interventions, from strengthening R&D and manufacturing to improving access to capital and accelerating NHS adoption, designed to support companies to start, scale and remain in the UK.

Yet since the plan was launched, the UK biotech sector, which has struggled with capital constraint for some time, has continued to feel squeezed. Over the 18–24 months to the beginning of 2026, many companies within the sector have struggled, particularly in wet-lab, pre-clinical drug discovery where high fixed costs collide with a thinner funding pipeline resulting from high investor caution at this early point in the discovery cycle.

A succession of discovery-stage and platform companies have responded with hiring freezes, restructurings and, in some cases, significant redundancies, not as a reflection of weak science but of a risk environment in which early clinical inflection points are increasingly hard to finance. It was precisely this tension, between the ambition of the Life Sciences Sector Plan and the day-to-day reality of keeping discovery teams, infrastructure and IP anchored in the UK, that made it necessary to bring founders, investors, clinicians and advisors together; to test the Plan against lived experience and to frame concrete, near-term asks of Government.

PM Life Sciences had recently set out some asks of Government in their policy paper, From Hosting Innovation to Owning It: Why UK Life Sciences Policy Must Shift Focus from Multinationals to Scaling Domestic Biotech.

On the evening of 14 May 2026, One Nucleus convened a sector dinner to test and develop some of those ideas.

The session was attended by investors, founders, clinicians, consultants and sector specialists and was structured around three important questions. The discussion was deliberately pitched at identifying asks of Government that are realistic, deliverable and grounded in policy frameworks that already exist, principally the Life Sciences Sector Plan and the O'Shaughnessy Review on commercial clinical trials, while being prepared to challenge both where necessary.

There were some central ideas driving the evening, but we were prepared to challenge these ideas where necessary. One idea in particular is that the UK's life sciences ecosystem is structurally misconfigured: well-funded science and late stage development of de-risked assets, but relatively under-resourced at the moment of maximum commercial vulnerability for domestic companies: the transition from pre-clinical work into early clinical development.

The dinner sought to explore these assumptions and establish actionable recommendations that could provide a meaningful boost to the sector, either to be requested of Government or to be implemented by individuals wherever possible. It was perhaps unsurprising that overall there was appetite for self reliance wherever possible. That said, a number of recommendations to Government were made and are outlined at the end of the paper.

We structured the evening around three questions:

Question 1: If investors aren't funding early drug discovery, who will and should?

Question 2: What should the UK Government do to protect early drug discovery capacity, given fiscal constraints, geopolitics, and competition from other sectors?

Question 3: How can Government support R&D staff transitioning to the future sector if structural redundancy is permanent?

Read the full report along with what the groups said and proposed actions here. 

If you would like to submit a guest blog please email [email protected].