Growth target: Can Scotland's life sciences sector hit £25bn by 2035?

By its own measure, Scotland’s life sciences sector is an overachiever. 

Leaders hoped it would reach a turnover of £8bn by 2025. Reaching that target, set in 2017, meant doubling the value of the sector within just eight years, driving growth in everything from drug development to agriculture. 

If it was a risk, it paid off – the ambition was met within half of that time and exceeded well before deadline, with the sector’s economic value reaching almost £10.9bn by 2021. Even after the pandemic-related spike in activity subsided, the level remained higher than had been hoped for, sitting at £10.5bn in 2022. 

The scale and pace of growth has seeded a new optimism – and a determination that much more is possible. A new strategy under development is to reset the goal to a cool £25bn by 2035. If achieved, it will mean the value of this multifaceted sector has increased more than six-fold within just 13 years. Is it really possible? “What we are expecting is a substantial inflection upwards,” says Mark Cook of the Life Sciences Scotland Industry Leadership Group (ILG).

“The global markets are absolutely enormous. The offerings we have are very, very attractive.

“Scotland is working very hard to position itself as the go-to destination.”

The ILG brings together senior figures from enterprise agencies, private companies and government strategy teams to develop and drive the strategy underpinning the sector. Cook, its chair, has a background in pharmaceuticals and medical technology. These are key pillars of the sector, but are not its limit, with life sciences also encapsulating everything from veterinary science to agriculture. The broad field employed as many as 22,000 people in 2023, a figure which rises significantly when the 46,900 people working in related ‘cluster’ businesses and institutions is added. Output rose by 6.1 per cent in the most final quarter of 2024, meaning it outperformed the economy as a whole, with its workforce commanding higher-than-average wages.

It is quite simply, Cook argues, the future. That kind of evangelising is perhaps unsurprising from someone leading a mission for sectoral growth. He says it’s a practical position and compares the sector’s prospects for innovation with that of another key industry – tourism. 

“We have tourism coming out of every orifice but how many more castles can we sell? Not so many,” Cook says. 

He poses the question of whether parents would prefer their children to go into the comparatively lower-paid tourism or hospitality sectors or into life sciences, “with some of the highest average wages in Scotland”.

“If you are a company, if you are a university, if you are the chief scientist, if you are me, if you are Kate Forbes from an economy perspective or Neil Gray from a health perspective, we all want exactly the same thing. We are operating in an environment where there’s 100 per cent alignment and that makes such a difference. We may all get different benefits from wanting the same thing, but everybody is very happy to align on this.

“From a government perspective, when they look at which industries would be good to grow in Scotland, life sciences is very much in a sweet spot because it’s got a higher productivity GVA (Gross Value Added).”

Indeed, that interest is demonstrable – when national development agency Scottish Enterprise wanted to announce the achievement of record results last summer, it chose to do so at a life sciences company, taking Deputy First Minister Forbes along to do so. 

Forbes and Adrian Gillespie, the chief executive of Scottish Enterprise, hailed the progress made by scale-up drug manufacturer Symbiosis in Stirling, where 50 highly-skilled jobs are expected to be created over the next few years. The company, which has been backed by a £4.3m grant from the agency, provides manufacturing services to global biotech and pharma firms developing vaccines and drug therapies, and is on a mission for growth. “This support for Symbiosis is just one example of how Scottish Enterprise is targeting key areas – in this case the life sciences sector – to bring significant capital investment and improve manufacturing, boosting exports,” said Forbes, whose responsibilities include the economy.

According to the most recent Scottish Economic Bulletin, overall growth rose by 1.1 per cent in 2024, marking a notable increase on the 0.5 per cent achieved the year before. However, the Fraser of Allander Institute last week downgraded its growth forecast for this year and next, saying that the “the outlook among businesses remains pessimistic” despite a drop in inflation.

“The beginning of 2025 has seen growing unease as firms prepare for rising costs and escalating geopolitical tension – most notably, the introduction of trade tariffs by US President Donald Trump,” the research unit said. “Our latest forecasts reflect this more subdued landscape. We now expect Scottish GDP to grow by 0.9 per cent in 2025, followed by modest growth of 1.1 per cent in both 2026 and 2027. These are downward revisions from our previous estimates, underscoring ongoing concerns over global economic fragility, tighter UK fiscal policy, and lingering inflationary pressures.”

The Trump administration has imposed tariffs of 25 per cent on goods including steel and aluminium, and last week the UK and US were in negotiations about an economic deal that would grant Britain an exemption. 

The ILG has recently held talks of its own with a North American delegation as part of ongoing efforts to attract overseas players to do business in Scotland. Cook is “optimistic that the headwinds shouldn’t affect us as much”, given the sector’s importance to human health and the “unique” offering here.

“There are very few countries or places in the world that have quite what we have,” he says. “We have a comparatively small population but it’s big enough, and as a country that makes us very agile. We have an excellent population mix which includes diversity. We have got a national data system which makes it ideal to track people throughout their care journeys and we have some fantastic and world-leading educational institutions with tremendous research capabilities, plus we have a government that has put life sciences as one of its key sectors for economic transformation. We have so many parts aligning.”

But the £25bn target is not sewn-up yet and Scotland’s sector faces competition from competitors elsewhere, including the “golden triangle” of London, Oxford and Cambridge. 

A magnet for investors and with lab space running into the millions of square footage, the area has grown in renown thanks in no small part to the universities from which so many life sciences spin-outs emerge. One of these – Cambridge – is home to one of the four specialist research centres to open in 2016 thanks to funding from the Leverhulme Trust. The AI-focused Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence is the result of the same funding round that saw the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science open at the University of Dundee.

Opened by the Queen and Prince Philip in October 2016, the £10m centre is now set to close as its funding reaches an end. 

On the day of its opening, esteemed anatomist Professor Sue Black said it would “raise the bar in the standards of science” and build “a new future” for the discipline. She wasn’t wrong – its team would go on to variously develop new chemical sensors for drug testing, discover how specific neck vertebrae can be used to determine sex, and identify an increase in steroid use in Scottish prisons. The findings attracted significant academic and public interest, with the centre becoming a go-to for crime writers fleshing out their latest tartan noir novels. Its growing reputation helped to further Dundee’s status as a city of science.

Its impending closure comes as a gaping £35m black hole has emerged in the university’s finances. As many as 700 posts could be made redundant in swingeing job cuts and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) has opened an investigation into what went wrong. “It’s vital that the circumstances surrounding the financial challenges at the university are fully investigated, with rigour and transparency, and that lessons are learned to minimise the risk of this situation arising again,” said SFC chief executive Francesca Osowska, promising a “robust process”.

The university’s troubles are so acute that they caught the attention of the Scottish Parliament’s education committee, which sought evidence from interim principal Professor Shane O’Neill. In his appearance before the panel, O’Neill emphasised that the centre’s closure is “separate from the major restructuring” taking place across the institution, and told MSPs that “we do not see a sustainability plan emerging so we cannot keep the centre open beyond the life of the grant”.

There are “strengths in other parts of the university in other areas” of science, he said.

Despite this, some have questioned what the university’s reductions will mean for Dundee, a city with scientific inquiry in its DNA, and for Scottish science in general. “It doesn’t make sense,” said Labour MSP Michael Marra, a former deputy director of the centre. “Staff have worked with [the] judiciary across the UK to modernise the scientific underpinnings of court cases and are now pioneering a drug-testing service that could impact Scotland’s terrible record on drug deaths.”

However, Cook says he is confident in the prospects for continued research and development at the university, and for the future pipeline of graduates needed to power the life sciences sector. Scotland can compete with the golden triangle, he says. “The costs of setting up there are absolutely astronomical, whereas we are very competitive.

“The ability we have to deliver in Scotland at scale and pace is better than the golden triangle.”

What is needed, he says, is to simplify the approval processes that can mean repeat applications needed to be submitted to allow for work in different locations. “You may have to seek the same approval multiple times over” under the current set-up, he says, and a “once-for-Scotland approach” would make things “much cleaner” and allow teams with permissions in Edinburgh to work in Glasgow and Aberdeen without having to seek separate approvals. “If we can streamline, that will give us another competitive advantage,” he argues.