In February 2026, the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee heard testimony that laid bare a structural failure in UK life sciences commercialisation. The witness was not a lobbyist or a politician. He was a working scientist who has spent decades building the translation infrastructure at one of Britain’s top research universities.
His account was striking for its specificity. A typical interaction with venture capital goes like this: the university presents five or six research opportunities with commercial potential. The investors identify one or two they like, then ask for additional proof-of-concept work — “come back when you’ve done A, B and C.” At which point, he said, “everybody looks at each other and says, well, who’s going to fund that?”
“Something that might be £20 million to £30 million-worth of prior UKRI and charity investment ends up stuck on the shelf going nowhere for the sake of a quarter of a million pounds to do some key proof-of-concept experiments or business analysis.”
Oral evidence to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, February 2026
The arithmetic is worth pausing on. Decades of public investment — tens of millions of pounds per innovation — reaches the threshold of commercial viability and then stalls. Not because the science is weak. Not because the market doesn’t exist. Because nobody will fund a quarter of a million pounds of bridge work that sits in the gap between public research and private investment.
The stand-off
This is what the witness called a “Mexican stand-off.” The public sector assumes the private sector will bridge the gap. The private sector assumes the public sector will. Neither does. The innovation sits on a shelf.
The pattern is not anecdotal. Across UK universities, research groups producing genuinely novel work in diagnostics, therapeutics, and medical devices face the same structural barrier. Their publicly funded work produces discoveries that international venture capital finds interesting — but not yet investable. The distance between “interesting” and “investable” is usually a handful of experiments, a regulatory pathway analysis, or a competitive landscape assessment. Work that costs a fraction of what has already been spent.
When the gap isn’t bridged, one of two things happens. Either the innovation goes nowhere at all — the most common outcome — or it gets picked up at a discount by under-capitalised angel investors. The result, as the testimony put it, is “zombie companies at best — they’re not terrible things, but they don’t really move the needle for UK prosperity.”
The geography problem
There is a second dimension. Even when translation does succeed, the resulting companies tend to migrate. Research conducted in Dundee, Manchester, or Leeds ends up incorporated in Oxford or Cambridge, close to the capital and the investor networks. The witness described this as a “levelling-down agenda” — a systematic drain of commercially valuable innovation from the regions that produced it.
This matters for regional economic strategy. If you are an integrated care board, a combined authority, or an investor looking at life sciences clusters outside the Golden Triangle, you need to understand not just what research is being produced in your region, but what is happening to it commercially. Is it being translated locally? Is it migrating? Is it stuck on the shelf?
The testimony suggested that roughly 1% of R&D budget should be allocated to proof-of-concept bridging. At current UK life sciences R&D spending levels, that represents a relatively modest intervention — with an estimated 40–60x return including foreign direct investment attracted by properly capitalised spin-outs.
The scaling cliff
Even for innovations that do clear the proof-of-concept barrier, a second bottleneck awaits. UK life sciences companies that reach series A or B frequently struggle to find domestic capital for scaling. Unlike technology companies, life sciences ventures cannot grow on minimal capital — clinical development, regulatory approval, and manufacturing all require substantial investment over long timelines.
The testimony pointed to a familiar culprit: UK pension capital. Enormous pools of domestic savings sit in low-yield instruments while high-growth life sciences companies look overseas for the investment they need to scale. The companies that survive the proof-of-concept gap then face a scaling gap — and the economic benefit of their success accrues elsewhere.
What this means
For anyone working in this space — whether you are a university tech transfer office, an investor evaluating life sciences opportunities, an ICB thinking about local innovation ecosystems, or a company trying to build the evidence base for NHS adoption — the implication is the same. The UK has a visibility problem as much as a funding problem. The innovations exist. The commercial potential is real. But nobody has a clear picture of which opportunities are stuck, where they are, and what it would take to move them forward.
The answer is not more data. The answer is better-connected intelligence — linking what is being researched to what is being funded, what is being formed as companies, what is clearing regulatory pathways, and what is being adopted by the NHS. That chain of evidence is what turns a vague sense that “translation is broken” into an actionable view of where the opportunities actually are.