When COVID-19 swept the globe, it laid bare the fragility of global medical supply chains as countries without their own drug-making capacity could not access life-saving treatments quickly. 

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Countries are still vulnerable, whether from another pandemic or trade disputes that culminate in medicine shortages. A handful of countries dominate the supply of critical therapeutic ingredients. Even the UK, a high-income economy with a world leading life sciences industry, is facing medicine shortages for diabetes, ADHD, epilepsy, and hormone replacement therapy.

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The lesson is clear; strategic autonomy in developing and producing therapeutics and biotech is a national imperative, as essential to security as energy, defense, or food security. And governments can play a catalytic role in fostering biotech as a strategic industry that bolsters autonomy and drives jobs and growth. 

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Just like the Defense Production Act in the US combines financial firepower with expedited approvals to kickstart domestic production, the time is ripe for governments to accelerate healthcare innovation to foster security in an uncertain world. That opportunity is not limited to the highest income nations, either. Serbia, for example, is a rising emerging market biotech star, developing a tech park in Belgrade pooling research centres for biomedicine, biotechnology, bioinformatics and biodiversity. The UK Government’s Life Sciences Sector Plan was both timely and welcome when it was published this summer - but it does not go far enough when it comes to strengthening our healthcare sovereignty. 

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‘Sovereign health’ goes further than backing individual biotech companies and therapeutics.  We believe that there is an emerging class of startups who sit at the intersection of health, deep-tech, digital infrastructure and AI that can help square this circle. We are calling this new market segment ‘bio-infrastructure’. These bioinfrastructure companies are creating the underlying data infrastructure that makes healthcare ambient, responsive and predictive, a layer of intelligence that supports every citizen from birth to their hundredth birthday. As societies age, we urgently need a health system that is as personalised and dynamic as our biology. 

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When we talk about bioinfrastructure, we should think of predictive AI that optimises clinical trial design, matching therapies to the right patients, including based on gender, race or genetics, while trimming costs from this expensive phase. R&D notebooks allowing technicians to record and share their experimental data to collaborate. Cloud platforms that let scientists run experiments without their own physical labs. Software that automatically guarantees medical devices adhere to security and compliance provisions. AI agents that produce regulatory filings, allowing biotechs and pharma to focus on the science. 

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These businesses don’t fit the traditional categories healthcare investors are accustomed to; they are neither drug developers nor conventional software companies. But their solutions are, collectively, producing a layer of intelligence that will power the health systems of tomorrow, from drug discovery to the care economy.  

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The infrastructure layer is an enabler for everything that happens on top. Think of AlphaFold, the protein structure prediction database developed by Google DeepMind and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. This is more than a data science project; it’s an engine for the entire field of life sciences. 

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The bio-infrastructure opportunity comes at a critical moment for healthcare systems. We’ve seen impressive strides in therapeutics, from cell and gene therapy to mRNA vaccines. Babies born in the near future could even expect a 100-year life. But that will require a health system radically different to the one we have today. Promising drug targets might go unfunded if clinical trials are too costly or the right patients can’t be enrolled quickly enough. Rapid diagnostic devices are little use if patients with suspected cancer take weeks to get their first appointment. And too many frontier innovations like ultra-fast diagnostics and next-generation imaging are limited to private clinics and concierge services for the wealthy.  

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We’re still relying on infrastructure designed for another century, where healthcare was episodic and reactive and few people lived to see their 70th birthday. We need a new infrastructure that enables the interplay of data, tooling, physical equipment and health services. 

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Governments cannot solve the problem alone, but they do have access to transformative levers to build bio-infrastructure capability. They should make sovereign health - powered by bioinfrastructure - a pillar of their industrial strategy. The UK Government has started to do this - setting out an ambitious goal to be the leading Life Sciences economy in Europe by 2030 (and taking up position only behind China and the US). However this strategy, whilst welcome, remains skewed towards funding “novel, advanced science” rather than enabling scale and impact through accessible, early interventions and affordable innovation. 

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For example, the Government’s Life Sciences Sector plan highlights cell and gene therapies, quantum diagnostics, and other “moonshot” fields, but overlooks proven, cost-saving modalities like biosimilars, platform biomanufacturing, and practical tech transfer. 

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The plan also does not go far enough in terms of its focus on preventative health and early intervention. In the UK, approximately 5.2% of government healthcare expenditure is allocated to preventive care. This should be much higher - up to 30% of healthcare spending if we are going to be able to have a healthier population which lives longer and is more economically productive. Healthcare spending also needs to be much better targeted to low income and vulnerable groups who face significant often overlapping health issues.  

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Governments and development banks should set aside meaningful capital for investing in venture, private equity and debt funds backing bio-infrastructure. There should also be more support for incremental innovation with relatively low development cost but high societal impact. This includes areas such as localised biogeneric and biosimilar manufacturing, which could allow national health bodies to purchase drugs at cost or royalty-free. In addition, they should consider incentives such as exceptional talent visas and targeted tax breaks for businesses with low revenue multiples, reflecting the unique business models of emerging companies in the bio-infrastructure space as compared to conventional Saas or drug discovery companies. 

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None of this is easy at a time of tight public finances and many competing demands on government spending. But health, like security, is the foundation on which everything else depends. And, right now, we’re lacking the modern infrastructure our nation needs to stay well and stay competitive in a new era of longevity.  Sovereign bio-infrastructure could hold the keys to a healthier tomorrow: we mustn’t miss the chance to build it. 

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