What’s coming in 2026: Manufacturing, rare disease, animal research, tax
As 2026 shapes up to an unpredictable year, our policy experts have provided more grounding for what the life sciences sector should expect over the next 12 months. This is the second and final part of our 2026 outlook series.
Manufacturing
The year is 2026, innovative medicines will be made faster, smarter and a whole lot more sustainable.
Medicine manufacturing is on the edge of greatness within the UK. AI-driven manufacturing is beginning to manage processes, adjusting manufacturing in real time and cutting batch failures, while robotics pushes companies toward “lights-out” production that runs through the night with almost no human presence. At the same time, the industry is shifting from massive, centralised facilities to nimble, modular systems like "micro-factories" which can be deployed near hospitals, regional hubs that shorten supply chains and 3D printers capable of producing personalised doses on demand.
What’s coming next is a year defined by speed, precision and personalisation. mRNA and cell therapies are moving rapidly through the clinic into scalable commercial production, supported by digital twins, real-time quality testing and greener, more sustainable processes. As the line between biotech and advanced manufacturing blurs, the manufacturing world is preparing for a future where medicines are not just made faster but tailored to individuals, produced closer to patients and monitored continuously by AI.
Emily Klein
Senior Policy and Public Affairs Executive
UK medicine pricing and rare diseases
2026 is set to be a pivotal year for UK medicine pricing and access policy, shaped by the UK-US pharmaceuticals trade deal. Changes to NICE’s standard technology appraisal (STA) cost effectiveness thresholds and the introduction of a new value set for evaluating health-related quality of life are welcome signals toward capturing the broader benefits of innovative medicines, strengthening the UK commercial medicines’ environment and ensuring delivery of access to cutting-edge medicines for NHS patients. Broadly speaking, these reforms are a promising step towards evolving and modernising medicine value frameworks.
But ensuring rare diseases are a priority remains paramount, including by applying the same proportionate increases to STA thresholds to the thresholds in NICE’s Highly Specialised Technologies (HST) programme, in order to ensure patients with ultra-rare diseases can benefit from proposed reforms. Treatments for rare and ultra-rare conditions are often at the frontier of exciting scientific innovation yet still face significant barriers navigating regulatory and appraisal pathways due to small patient populations and limited evidence. The implementation of connected, flexible and risk-proportionate approaches to access pathways will be critical to ensure equitable access to innovative medicines for patients on the NHS in 2026 and the years to come.
The key challenge for 2026 will be balancing affordability with ambition, creating an access system that rewards innovation while delivering equitable patient access to treatments. Close collaboration across system partners, including Government, policymakers, industry and patient organisations is needed to align evolving policy with the realities of cutting-edge science and translate ambitions into meaningful impact for patients while establishing the UK as a global leader in rare disease innovation and access.
The coming year offers a real opportunity to strengthen the UK’s position as a world leader in medical innovation and access. Greater moves towards incorporating the wider long term and societal value of innovative medicines will be crucial towards making this a reality.
Animal research and NAMs
The Government has laid legislation to amend the Public Order Act 2023, which will extend the definition of Key National Infrastructure to include the life sciences sector. This change will strengthen the police’s ability to respond to disruptive protest activity that undermines our national health resilience. This proposed change in the law has begun its passage through Parliament and, once approved, is expected to come into force in March 2026. Last year saw a considerable upsurge in animal rights activism that veered into harassment, vandalism and theft at animal research facilities. However, the amendment to the Act will likely result in a significant decrease in this activism, thereby addressing a serious issue that was threatening to disrupt the development of new treatments and job creation in the sector.
Siddharth Subramaniam
Senior Policy and Public Affairs Executive
The Government’s ‘Replacing animals in science’ strategy commits to establishing a UK Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (UKCVAM) and a new preclinical translational models hub, backed by £60 million in government funding, alongside an additional £15.9 million investment – committed by the Medical Research Council (MRC), Innovate UK and the Wellcome Trust – in promising ‘human in vitro models’. The strategy builds on the Government’s manifesto pledge to phase out animal testing faster, wherever reliable, validated alternative methods are available. By now setting out concrete measures for greater investment in alternative methods, which are welcomed by industry, we can expect to see strong initial progress for the phasing them in over the next year.
Lewis Miles
Policy and Public Affairs Manager
Tax
R&D tax reliefs are poised to become more efficient and more effective following a number of measures from HMRC and beyond to improve the schemes and ensure they're delivering for the sectors that need them.
These measures include the launch of HMRC's Research and Development (R&D) Expert Advisory Panel – upon which sits the Chair of the BIA's Finance and Tax Committee, Melissa Strange – numerous measures to clamp down on fraud and non-compliance, and a workshop provided by the BIA to HMRC outlining the nuances of the life sciences sector, and how claims can be processed more reliably and efficiently.
Taken together, these measures are set to deliver a scheme that shows marked improvement, and, who knows, cost-savings from increased efficiency and decreased fraud could be funnelled back into the schemes in the form of a more generous relief rate of 33p/£ for R&D intensive SMEs.
