Oxford university to host £115m diabetes research centre

From ft.com

Oxford university will host a £115m diabetes research centre funded over 10 years by Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk.
Sir John Bell, Oxford’s professor of medicine and the government’s “life sciences champion”, said the investment signalled the revival of drug discovery research in the UK, after a decade-long decline.
“We once had 11 companies doing early-stage discovery research in the UK and now we have just two or three,” he said. “I think we can get that back to six or seven, making use of Britain’s world-leading strengths in the life sciences.”
About 100 Novo Nordisk scientists will work at the Oxford centre, investigating new ways of treating type-2 diabetes. The centre will be built on the university’s growing biomedical campus in Headington.
Among international drug companies, only GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and to a lesser extent UCB of Belgium still carry out discovery research on a significant scale in Britain, Sir John said.
Others are involved in later-stage development work, including clinical trials, as well as activities such as sales, marketing and management.
He was optimistic that two or three more companies would soon announce substantial research investments in the UK, encouraged by the government’s new industrial strategy and its announcement in November of a further £2bn in R&D spending.
Virginia Acha, research director at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said UK universities were also benefiting from a shift in corporate research from in-house labs to collaboration with external partners.
“Although most large companies have significantly decreased their number of in-house drug discovery employees in the UK, they have increased their investment in collaborative and outsourced research,” she said.
Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, Novo Nordisk’s chief scientist, said the decision to set up the Oxford research centre followed 15 years of working with the university on a smaller scale, including a postdoctoral fellowship programme.

https://www.ft.com/content/8db89d84-e650-11e6-893c-082c54a7f539