Genesis 2025: Maximising returns from life science innovation

Louisa Jacobs and Oliver Alsop attended this year’s One Nucleus Genesis conference, which brought together industry, investors, entrepreneurs and opinion leaders for a day of sessions exploring some of the most pressing challenges in the life sciences sector.

A dominant theme was the mounting pressure created by ageing populations, rising comorbidities and the growing burden of cardiovascular, neurological, oncology and metabolic diseases. Development and adoption of monitoring and diagnostic technologies will be essential to help us shift from reactive care to predicting and preventing disease earlier, reducing the strain on healthcare systems and helping people live healthier for longer. Meaningful global impact, however, will depend on the democratisation of access and ensuring that both medicines and emerging health technologies reach broader populations.

Speakers also highlighted the huge promise of truly curative cell and gene-based therapies and the appeal of “one-and-done” approaches, while acknowledging the realities: very high prices, reimbursement challenges and complex delivery. A clear takeaway was the importance of designing therapies with the patient experience in mind from day one. Even transformative therapies can struggle to gain traction if their delivery is burdensome.

The investment climate was another strong thread. The past two years have been extremely challenging for early-stage biotech, with high interest rates pushing capital toward safer assets and making initial funding rounds harder to secure. There was speculation on whether the British Business Bank’s recent announcement of the £200m British Growth Partnership (which it appears will be backed by UK pension schemes) will mark the start of new pools of capital being made available to high growth UK companies. 

Panellists also reflected on how companies can position themselves for success by attracting the investment they need: AI is now pervasive, but value is gravitating toward businesses with high-quality, non-public datasets. There was also consensus around the need for cross-disciplinary teams able to genuinely integrate biology, engineering, computation and clinical development and communicate effectively across those boundaries. 

Overall, Genesis 2025 painted a picture of a sector under a lot of pressure but still full of promise and opportunity.