The UK is rich in dementia innovation – we must have a sense of urgency to turn that promise into reality

That question is beginning to shift.

As the pipeline matures and new approaches move through regulatory processes, attention is increasingly turning to a different issue – not whether innovation is possible, but whether it can be realised in practice. Specifically, whether UK life sciences companies can sustain, commercialise and ultimately deliver that innovation at scale.

There is, however, plenty of reason for optimism. The UK’s strength in life sciences research is well established. Its universities and research institutions are among the best in the world, and its contribution to early-stage discovery is widely recognised.

Yet that optimism is tempered by a second, less comfortable reality. We haven’t always been as successful at converting that scientific strength into long-term commercial and societal value.

Dementia brings that challenge into sharp focus.

The dearth of approved treatments on the market illustrates the scale of that challenge. It requires long-term commitment, significant capital investment and the ability to operate through extended periods of uncertainty. Progress is measured over decades, not years, with success depending as much on organisational resilience as it does on scientific insight.

TauRx has operated within that environment for over 20 years. During that time, we have raised £890 million in investment, conducted global clinical trials from Aberdeen, and navigated the wider complexities of long-term drug development to help address one of the world’s greatest unmet medical needs in Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

The majority of those involved in conducting those four global trials were embarking on a journey they had never been on before and built their skills from scratch. Despite their inexperience, it’s a process that proved fruitful, with the results of those trials being published in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease (JPAD) in two different peer-reviewed papers earlier this year.

The papers report that our drug – which is currently undergoing review by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) – halted progression of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease and that participants with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) who received the drug experienced statistically significant cognitive improvement over 18 months.

Participants also displayed no evidence of statistically significant cognitive or functional decline over a period of two years, with headache (1.5 per cent) and diarrhoea (1.2 per cent) reported as the most frequent adverse effects at a 16 mg/day dose.

Those experiences make one point clear. Innovation of this kind does not succeed in making a difference to the lives of patients and their loved ones without the right commercial conditions to incubate it.

So, while the UK’s challenge isn’t an absence of innovation, there remains a gap between innovation and commercialisation. Too often in recent decades, companies developing promising science have struggled to access the capital required for late-stage development, or find that the conditions for scaling are more favourable elsewhere. As a result, activity can move and the economic value of innovation is realised outside the UK.

This has implications beyond the life sciences sector itself. When commercialisation happens elsewhere, the UK loses not only economic return, but also strategic capability and influence over how innovation is developed and deployed. For patients, it can mean slower or more limited access to new treatments.

In dementia, where the scale of need is growing and the burden on health systems is significant, these dynamics are particularly important. For example, the Alzheimer’s Society estimates dementia will cost the UK economy more than £90 billion annually by 2040. Ensuring that innovation reaches patients requires more than just successful trials like the four TauRx has conducted. It requires companies that can sustain long development cycles, investment that supports progression through complex stages, and systems that can ultimately deliver treatments in real-world settings.

There is increasing recognition within government at all levels in the UK that life sciences is a strategic priority. Going forward, realising that ambition will require a sharpened focus on the full innovation lifecycle, including ensuring there is alignment with our healthcare providers in the NHS, and also that innovation is not only developed, but adopted and delivered effectively – something critical with a disease like dementia which impacts so many people.

TauRx isn’t alone in having grappled with these questions, though we have managed to thrive outside the ‘golden triangle’ hub of life sciences company growth in England.

Organisations that have navigated a similar journey have a role to play in encouraging the whole sector to succeed. Not as advocates for individual programmes, but as contributors of experience.

At TauRx, that experience includes building a company and an excellent team outside traditional centres of gravity and working through the practical realities of bringing innovation towards potential use.

These are not abstract policy conundrums. They are operational realities that determine whether innovation succeeds or stalls. But success won’t be defined by discovery alone. It will be defined by whether we can create the conditions for that innovation to be sustained, commercialised and delivered at scale, both domestically and globally.

The risk is not that the UK fails to generate breakthroughs. The risk is failure to fully realise their value.

Glenn Corr is Chief Business Officer/Chief Operating Officer, of Aberdeen-based TauRx