By Tushar Jhanwar, Programme Manager for the Life Science Hub.
When we started building the Life Science Hub, we had a clear and overarching goal: create a practical way for the NHS and industry to tackle real cancer care challenges together.
Not another talking shop, but a working model that helps us meet the NHS Long Term Plan's cancer ambitions through genuine collaboration. The idea was straightforward: bring life science organisations together through shared investment to address clinical and operational challenges.
The Life Science Hub is currently funded and hosted through a partnership between the Midlands Cancer Alliances, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and NHS Arden & GEM. This broad partnership enables open participation for the NHS to submit challenges and for industry to offer capabilities to co-create solutions.
Listening to both sides
Good collaboration requires understanding what both parties need. We ran two parallel engagement processes over several months to get this right.
Working with industry
We’ve hosted webinars and discussion sessions with a straightforward question: what makes it difficult to work effectively with the NHS? The feedback was honest and useful. Industry partners told us they needed clearer problem definitions, access to clinical teams, and better understanding of NHS governance and decision-making processes. They wanted to contribute meaningfully, not just respond to tenders.
This input directly shaped how we designed the programme. We built in structured problem-framing, created opportunities for clinical dialogue, and committed to transparent communication about objectives and next steps.
Working with clinical teams
Cancer improvement leads and clinicians in the Alliances have mobilised intelligence across the Midlands. Through workshops and pathway reviews covering seven priority tumour sites and Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT), we identified together the pressure points that affect patient care daily. Concrete challenges were identified including diagnostic delays in PET-CT pathways, pathology turnaround times affecting 28-day Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS) performance, SACT capacity constraints and gaps in personalised follow-up care.
These discussions resulted in over 25 detailed challenge mandates, each outlining the problem, desired outcomes, key enablers and success measures. This gave us a clear, clinically validated pipeline to work from.
Building momentum
These two workstreams are now merging. We have invited our industry partners to submit proposals in response to clinical challenges. We've held roundtable sessions where clinical leads and industry experts work through specific pathway bottlenecks together.
More than 70 life sciences organisations across pharma, MedTech, HealthTech and diagnostics have now engaged with the Hub and Alliances so far. A key requirement is the collaboration of industry with the NHS across pathways of care.
The Life Science Hub is designed to face both ways: supporting clinical teams to articulate their challenges clearly and helping industry partners understand where their capabilities can make a genuine difference.
What comes next
Our Hub’s doors are continually open, for pharma, MedTech, HealthTech, diagnostics and academia to express their interest in collaborating and addressing real clinical challenges in the Midlands. We want to build a fresh strategic partnership framework that evidences and proves the NHS and industry can work together to find solutions and improve cancer outcomes for the 12 million people living in the Midlands.
Get in touch with the Hub team via uhl-tr.lifesciencehub@nhs.net
This blog was originally published in the Healthcare Engagement Society news section.