During the last election, I think the industry spent so much time distracted by the IRA and its potential impact on drug pricing that it missed the threats to the FDA and to scientific research and the potential imposition of tarrifs.

This is not good for the sector or for the health of patients.

While the issue in the UK is, yet another, government that really does not understand the connection between investment and uptake of medicines, I feel the issue in the US may be self-inflicted.

And none of those in between are duds.

This is not a "UK problem". The global biopharma industry has been built on M&A.

If a company can be acquired for £46bn, as was the case with Shire, then any company can.

What is important is that investors in companies being acquired make a sufficient return to want to invest in biotech again.

However, one area that I think will be impossible is to "build bigger, better British biotechs and keep them here, rather than them being sold to multinationals".

I'm not surprised that the trade associations are not particularly positive in their responses to this report.

There have been several similar ones since the turn of the century and successive govenments have always promised a lot and delivered only a fraction.

I hope it is different this time.

On the AI theme, @parmy.bsky.social's "Supremacy"

I would agree on the prose. However, I think the recent iterations of some of the GPT systems have significantly improved prose compared with the output a few months ago, which will make recruitment for roles that require writing more difficult.

How do you separate the genuine writers from the AI-generated submissions? We found that significant numbers of our applicants last year used AI to generate work and in some cases CVs, and when candidates got to an assessment centre the quality of writing was much lower than seen in recent years

Need to be careful when comparing prices from one country to another. Industry talks about list prices (what they'd like to be paid) vs negotiated prices. I recall the US list price of some of the HCV drugs was 3x the negotiated price in EU, which in turn was higher than average price paid in US.

This was my favourite science road graffiti. From the 2020 Il Lombardia.

That is a sweet version of what maybe my favourite song of theirs.

We also noticed that the standard of writing in our assessment centre exercises left a lot to be desired.