Beyond cancer treatment
Genomic medicine is making strides in many other specialities. Silence Therapeutics is another UK company working on advancing personalised treatments in the UK. It uses the body’s own capability of interfering with RNA to ‘switch off’ genes thought to be causing disease. It is working on therapies to tackle the genetic causes of cardiovascular disease – something that affects 20% of the population. Silence Therapeutics’ technology can be used to engineer short interfering ribonucleic acids (siRNAs) that bind specifically to and silence, through the RNAi pathway, almost any gene in the human genome to which siRNA can be delivered.
Personalised medicine, thanks to advances in genomics, could be transformative for healthcare in the coming decades. We need mechanisms that encourage more of our research departments, start-ups and disruptors working in the field to commercialise, scale and find a market for their innovations and products.
Until now our national approach to supporting R&D has focused on sending money the way of large incumbents – such as big pharmaceutical companies. That method does produce results – just look at AstraZeneca’s and Pfizer’s role in the development of Covid-19 vaccines – but it means we are missing out on the talents and technologies of so many of our small businesses and cutting edge research teams (after all it was Oxford University’s talents and BioNTech’s innovations that led to the breakthrough in the vaccine mission).
We need to introduce new funding mechanisms into the mix, that outside of a global crisis, level the playing field for these new and less well-known entrants – challenge prizes are one such method that achieve just that.
In July, we published the Great Innovation Challenge. We looked at the impact that ambitious challenge prizes have already had in medicine, including the KidneyX and Redesigning Dialysis Prizes in nephrology. And of course, we know from our own exciting work delivering the £8m Longitude Prize, how effective challenge prizes are in spurring medtech innovation, in this case in the development of novel diagnostics to tackle the rise of antibiotic resistant infections.
The Great Innovation Challenge recommended that the UK pursues opportunities to advance innovation in personalised medicine – not just for the benefit of innovators but for patients and doctors too. Since then we have worked to explore the concept further, and recommend more specific ways in which challenge prizes in personalised medicine can be put to great effect in curing rare and hard to treat diseases.