A recent FT article highlighted a growing trend: UK biotech firms are increasingly being acquired byUS pharma and biotech companies after early discovery. Some telling data points from recent reporting:
     ·      In 2025, and for the third consecutive year, no UK biotech companies IPO’d in London, while the vast majority of life-science listings and late-stage raises happened in the US
      ·      UK biotech continues to attract strong early-stage funding, but late-stage growth capital remains thin, pushing firms to seek US buyers or US markets
     ·     Many of the companies being acquired are clinically advanced, meaning much of the scientific risk has already been taken in the UK - but the scale-up value is realised elsewhere

US acquisitions are not inherently bad. The issue is that too many UK firms don’t have a genuine alternative. The UK is exceptionally good at creating biotech companies, but exceptionally poor at helping them stay independent through scale-up, manufacturing, and global commercialisation. Why does this matter? Because life sciences isn’t just an R&D success story - it’s high skilled jobs, resilient domestic supply chains and long-term tax and productivity gains.

An AI will tell you that the solution to all this is simply to build deeper late-stage capital pools – a fun jargon filled way of saying it would be easier if the UK had more cash. With current outlooks on the economy still relatively slow, this is a solution that is unlikely to bear fruit in the near future.Perhaps a better tact is to treat life sciences as an industrial strategy priority, not just are search one. Countries that retain biotech value (notably the US) align capital markets, regulation, manufacturing and procurement. The latter is one where the UK has a possible ace in the hole – the NHS. It’s one of the largest healthcare buyers in the world and could, theoretically, be mandated to purchase from UK based suppliers.  It’s a nice idea, that would vastly increase investor confidence in UK based firms. However, it would almost certainly require a greater spend from the NHS itself, effectively diverting the “more cash” problem from supplier to customer.

Wherever the solution lies, one thing is clear: the UK is missing out on some of the key benefits of its own research. Because the science is already world-class, the missing piece is the scale-up system around it.