Breaking up Brexit with Dr Paul Peter Tak

With manufacturers now stockpiling medicines and potential border delays between the EU and UK looking likely, the uncertainty surrounding Brexit is causing a lot of consternation. To gain a global perspective, Reece Armstrong sits down with Dr Paul Peter Tak, a venture partner at Flagship Pioneering and the former senior vice president of R&D, development leader and chief immunology officer at GSK, to gain a global perspective on Brexit and pharma.

Hailing from the Netherlands, Dr Tak’s involvement in life sciences is well regarded. A professor of medicine, Dr Tak is also on the board of directors at two biotech companies based in the UK, and his work at Flagship Pioneering helps create new biotech companies in Cambridge, Massachusetts (US). 

When discussing the UK’s situation with the EU, Dr Tak sees Brexit as something which presents a lot of dangers to the country’s healthcare system.

“The whole confusion around Brexit I see as a big risk for healthcare in the UK, for the NHS, for academic research and a risk for biotech and pharma,” Dr Tak says.

One of the most obvious consequences of Brexit is an increase in the already substantial vacancies within the NHS. Dr Tak sees Brexit’s psychological impact of having the potential to cause EU citizens to not feel welcome in the UK.

“The UK needs skilled people and the only way to get skilled people is to be able to offer long term stability to talented people, their careers and their families. But also, they need to feel at home right, and they need to feel part of the community, not like an outsider. I think the psychological impact surrounding the uncertainty of the UK leaving the EU, and perhaps even in that very disruptive way, should not be underestimated,” he says.

The impact of Brexit on people is something which Dr Tak feels particularly strongly about, especially when it comes to the academic workforce.

“There’s a reason that pharmaceutical companies like to be in the UK and that’s the very strong science. But science is dependent on people,” Dr Tak says. “In the long-term, Brexit has a potential impact on biotech and big pharma because they are dependent on the collaborations with the best academics; they recruit the people from academia, they work together with academia, they get ideas from academia and collaborate on clinical trials. If you do clinical trials, you need to be able to first get the medicines and a very hard ‘no deal’ Brexit may lead to disruption to the access of medicines from Europe to the UK and vice versa.”

 “There’s a reason that pharmaceutical companies like to be in the UK and that’s the very strong science.”

Dr Tak’s worries don’t stop there though. Academic research in the UK risks having large gaps in funding schemes due to Brexit, not to mention the loss of networking opportunities with EU peers.

“Science is all about networking, working together and if that would be disrupted it’d have a big impact, not only related to money, you can’t compensate everything by giving money to academics, they need to be part of these networks,” Dr Tak says.

Not that money isn’t an important factor for research. The EU’s Horizon 2020 programme for instance has provided the UK with €5.1 billion in funding since 2014, amounting to 14% of the programme’s €70 billion budget.

Thankfully, the strength of the UK’s pharma and biomedical industries means that the government shouldn’t be too willing to leave any gaps in funding, Dr Tak hopes.

“I would think that the UK government will be quite keen to compensate as much as possible because the whole pharma and biomedical infrastructure is so important for the UK economy,” Dr Tak says. “But you don’t know what happens on the long term. What would happen if the UK, after a hard no deal Brexit, would go into a recession? The UK government has always been invested and supportive of science and pharmaceutical research but things may become more difficult if the economy goes down.”

Perhaps most importantly though is that the UK would lose its important voice in helping shape the EU research agenda.

“You need to have a seat at the table where the decisions are made. What are we going to spend the billions of research on in Europe? I think it’ll be important to be involved in the networks in the future and to have a seat at the table and be influential,” Dr Tak says.

For this to happen, the UK would have to become an associate country, similar to what Norway has done, Dr Tak states, though this still wouldn’t be as ideal as being part of the EU.

As an ‘Associate Country’, the UK could still participate in Framework Programmes much like EU Member States. Crucially though, the UK would have a limited ability to influence any decisions related to European research funding.

We speak further on the issues that Brexit has already brought up; the closure of the EMA and the subsequent loss of 900 jobs, and how multi-country clinical trials will be made more difficult for UK-based pharma companies, due to increased administration and costs.

Increasingly though it becomes clear that much like the debate surrounding Brexit, Dr Tak simply isn’t sure what is going to happen. And while his experience offers an informed perspective, he isn’t so sure that the UK public have been made aware of any of the potential implications of Brexit on life sciences.

‘I look at it as a global citizen, a Dutch passport holder, a UK resident and tax payer, working in the UK and US. I think it’s sad for such a fantastic country that a big decision could be made that is not completely and optimally informed. I would think there is a responsibility for politicians and also people in these different sectors to try to be objective about it and to lay out what the implications are of different scenarios. There could be benefits, there are also clearly disadvantages and risks and that needs to be explained to the people to make an informed decision. I think that is what real democracy is about,” Dr Tak states.

Despite all of the negative connotations surrounding Brexit, Dr Tak isn’t willing to discount the UK as an exciting place for science.

“I don’t exclude the possibility that the UK will continue to be attractive. It completely depends on what Brexit is going to look like, what the consequent disruption will be and what the UK government will do to make it attractive to do biomedical and pharmaceutical research in the UK.”