Huddersfield might appear an unlikely setting for a thriving health research complex. The West Yorkshire town is best known for its manufacturing heritage, but has quickly become a honey pot for private sector businesses keen to collaborate with the town’s university in a push for the latest medical breakthroughs.
Next month, the driving force behind the University of Huddersfield’s national health innovation campus, Prof Liz Towns-Andrews, expects to get the go-ahead for the third of seven planned eco-buildings for research and tech development clustered near the town centre.
It was only in March that the £55m centre named after the local healthcare advocate Emily Siddon was opened by the then health innovation minister, Zubir Ahmed, boasting five floors and the UK’s first MRI scanner simulator. “It’s an MRI without the magnets, and yet you wouldn’t know it wasn’t a fully functioning machine,” says the Yorkshire-born Towns-Andrews.
The project – fuelled by a mix of private and public finance – provides a model for the UK’s universities as they tackle ailing balance sheets. With Oxford and Cambridge well established as hubs for medical and biotech spin-outs, other universities are working with health trusts and councils to further research and support local economies.
A recent report by the University of East London (UEL), which examined the accounts of 160 universities, found that almost 40 were near bankruptcy and had just two months of cash in the bank. Wes Streeting, before he quit as health secretary, had put in place investment funds to boost the building of new health centres and hospitals, but a shortage of funding has meant many have faced delays.
By contrast, Huddersfield had an operating surplus of about £10m in the 2024-25 financial year and is far from going bust. Beyond the MRI simulator, the Huddersfield complex boasts another new idea – Britain’s first community diagnostic centre on a university campus, developed in partnership with Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust.
Renowned in the university sector as an innovator, Towns-Andrews has insisted all the buildings be constructed to meet green and health benchmarks – known as the Well standard – that will rank them in the top 50 worldwide.
One of her aims is to raise the region’s dire levels of worker productivity. “Yorkshire and Humberside has one of the lowest outputs per hour in England, which makes it among the worst places for productivity.”
“To me it wasn’t rocket science that getting people healthy, fit and able to work would make the single biggest impact on productivity,” she says.
In part, the region’s universities, health trusts and councils have joined forces to ensure they secured some of the £2bn from West Yorkshire’s investment zone but also because their own funding has faced a squeeze over the past decade.
Yet, the building blocks of many modern local economy increasingly rest on bustling higher and further education institutions and health trusts. They are among the biggest employers, with financial clout, and have certain futures, allowing private sector businesses to sign long-term agreements.
Many of these businesses are manufacturers of health devices and drugs which see the UK’s globally recognised university sector as a bog attraction. For some companies, the attraction of Oxford and Cambridge has waned, pushing universities in other areas of the country to the fore.
As a sign of Britain’s industrial revival, the opening in Manchester next year of a FTSE 100 health company’s research and development centre provides a clear sense of direction.
Convatec might not be a household name, but the profitable manufacturer of specialist surgical pads said last year it had put Manchester – alongside its other R&D site in Boston, Massachusetts – as the twin centres of its global operations, giving England’s fastest growing major city a significant lift.
What lies behind the move? Tellingly, the company told shareholders that staff should be based in the city to benefit from collaborations with Manchester’s universities and the local NHS trusts.
Prof Tony Young, the national clinical director for innovation in NHS England, says Donald Trump’s chaotic attitude to business has also encouraged US health companies to back research in the UK. Rachel Reeves has played a part too, he says, funding biotech and health as a cornerstone of the government’s industrial policy.
Young started five companies while he was training to be a urology surgeon 20 years ago, raising £5m in private sector funds. “I had to fight the health system the whole way because I wanted to be a clinician and an entrepreneur,” he says.
The situation is very different today. “The NHS acts like an integrator, bringing on board the Nobel prizewinners and clinicians, so they can be part of an ecosystem that brings forward innovative ideas,” he says.
Towns-Andrews’s health hub has already supported 380 companies since September 2023 “and that number is only set to grow”, she says.
Young says the tie-ups behind this boom involve not just hospitals and universities, but also investors, investors, industry, purchasers and providers in the health system and charities Cancer Research UK combining their expertise.
Across the road from Huddersfield’s Emily Siddon building, in a designated “health tech and digital investment zone”, is a 125-year old textile mill that is about to be taken over and partly restored by Paxman Scalp Cooling, which has rapidly become one of the town’s fastest-growing businesses.
The scalp cooling is provided by a head cap that prevent hair loss during chemotherapy treatment. It has proved a massive hit and is now used by 97% of NHS trusts and across 50 countries. More than 50% of the firm’s exports go to hospitals in the US.
Richard Paxman, the chief executive of the Stockholm-listed business and son of the founder, says: “Over the years we have fostered many strong connections and partnerships with universities and organisations and acknowledge how much these partnerships have fuelled our innovation, business expansion, skills development and job creation.”
Despite these bright spots, Labour has had notable setbacks in dealing with the health industry since returning to power. Last year, the UK’s biggest pharma company, AstraZeneca, scrapped plans to invest £450m in its vaccine manufacturing facility in Speke, Merseyside, citing a cut in government support.
And the new investments have come too late to stop US companies such as Palantir and Epic Systems from winning big NHS contracts under controversial circumstances. Palantir to unify disparate databases, and Epic, which is opening a 36-hectare (90-acre) campus near Bristol, to provide the MyChart booking and records service.
But Carson McCombe, the head of innovation at the University of Huddersfield, says that after a difficult few years for universities, as they adjusted to fewer high-paying foreign students, there is an opportunity to turn the situation around.
“Putting together the council, university and health trust gives you powerful engine of economic growth,” he says.
Malcolm Press, the president of Universities UK, a lobby group for the sector, says the latest figures show the UK higher education sector’s teaching, research and innovation activities help the economy by £158bn.
One study in the US has attempted to calculate the impact more broadly. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, under the title “Anchor impact: understanding the role of higher education and hospitals in regional economies” calculated that combined, they provided 18m jobs and £1.1tn of income. Its research shows how health and higher education have become as important to the jobs market and growth as educating people and keeping them healthy.
As vice chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University, Press sees many of the health inititaives first hand, including one called “health innovation Manchester” that links all the universities and health trusts into one single digital network.
“We use it to translate research in health and social care into things that benefit local people,” he says.Elsewhere Derby University and Sandwell College are among many higher education bodies to sign deals with local NHS trusts this year.
Kingston University in west London has also spotted an opportunity to develop links with local hospital trusts to support medical training and small businesses looking to use the latest health technology.
The Kingston provost, Prof Kathy Curtis,says universities have a reputation for being leaden footed, and responding to calls for support by local companies by saying “you need a PhD student on a three-year programme to sort that out”.
“These days we are more likely to partner them with someone who is working on a doctoral thesis in that subject area for four weeks,” she says.
“We are pretty fleet of foot. And when industry comes to us with a problem, we try to tailor the answer to their needs.”