Skills gap poses risk to new cell and gene therapies

Exploring talent pools and rethinking remuneration packages are just two of the strategies for alleviating an anticipated skills shortage.

Skills – a developing issue

The UK’s CGT Catapult acts as a facilitator and aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and full-scale commercialisation of CGTs. In November 2021, it published a skills demand report which highlighted how the UK CGTs sector is on the brink of an upcoming skills crunch that could threaten investment in, and the manufacturing of, CGTs – treatments based on human cells or genes that have the potential to tackle problems such as heart failure, rare genetic diseases, and neuromuscular diseases.

According to the report, almost 7,000 people currently work across 63 CGTs companies in the UK, up from little more than 3,000 people across 42 companies in 2019. By 2026, demand for skilled people in the sector is expected to have more than doubled again to more than 15,000, but there is real concern about where the industry will get those people from.

The CGT Catapult said: “Identifying skilled and experienced people is seen as the top barrier to recruitment and retention of people. Companies are expected to be recruiting from the same talent pools within the UK, therefore a shift to recruiting from declining sectors, assessing transferable skills and upskilling people are vital.”

It identified “an urgent need” for skills programmes that have supported growth of the CGTs industry in the UK to be expanded, and added that “clear and visible routes to attract, train and retain highly skilled talent” are also needed.

Where skills are needed most

The skills crunch has arisen since growth in the CGT sector has been greater than anticipated – the CGT Catapult’s report shows that the headcount across the industry in 2021 has already outstripped what businesses in the sector had anticipated would be required in 2024.

The real bottleneck is in the skills required to take projects to the next level – production and sales.

CGTs often target rare diseases and are personalised to do so. Therefore, manufacturing is a highly manual process. The only way currently to scale production is to hire more skilled people. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology is not sufficiently advanced at the moment to have a significant impact on the skills shortage in manufacture in CGT.

According to the CGT Catapult’s report, a 184% increase in demand for manufacturing skills is anticipated by 2026, compared to 2021 levels. Demand for commercial staff is expected to jump more than 200%.

Other areas where the skill shortage will potentially have the most detrimental effect include supply chain and logistics, quality assurance and regulatory affairs.

In a rapidly growing sector such as CGT, the areas where skills are needed will change over time. In the future, combination therapies and combination products – bringing together advanced therapy medicinal products such as CGTs and medical devices – will require individuals with experience in medical devices, particularly from a regulatory and quality perspective.

Now, however, the focus must be on recruitment and retention of staff in the areas highlighted.

Ways to address the skills shortage

With companies looking to expand at a similar time, there are simply not enough trained individuals available to fill the vacancies arising. The new immigration rules that apply in the UK post-Brexit serve to limit the talent pool further. However, there are some potential solutions that companies in the sector can explore.

For example, different companies could consider creating talent pools to share access to skilled individuals who would be contracted to carry out similar or related work. When seeking feedback and recommendations on what would assist CGT companies in minimising their recruitment and retention barriers, the CGT Catapult said that “the need to work as a community to share talent, with the option to use pooled resource to work across companies was a theme across multiple respondents”. Once considered by some to be a radical idea, in light of the severity of the current skills shortage it seems that the appetite for shared talent pools is increasing.  

A short-term solution could be retraining or upskilling staff to perform duties where skills are scarce. Junior lab researchers could be trained how to undertake more complex work in the manufacturing process, for example.

Some skills – not least on the commercial side – are likely to be transferrable. A recruitment drive could attract people to leave work in other sectors for employment in the CGTs sector.

There has been some success in encouraging apprenticeships in the CGTs sector so far. The CGT Catapult said that 47% of the 63 respondents to its survey have an active apprentice through the Advanced Therapies Apprenticeship Community (ATAC) programme and that those companies said they would recommend the scheme to others. However, all but two of the companies bemoaned the lack of graduate life sciences apprenticeship programmes as a barrier to the development of skills in the sector.

In addition, fewer than half of CGT companies in the UK are aware of the Advanced Therapies Skills Training Network (ATSTN) online training platform – a resource that companies can tap into under a licence to build skills in CGTs.

With competition for skills likely to intensify, it is vital that CGT companies also review the remuneration packages they offer. Structured the right way, these can be attractive to new and existing staff without exposing what are often fledgling CGT companies to staff costs they cannot afford.

Offering equity as part of an overall remuneration package can incentivise recruitment and retention of skilled employees. Many start-ups grant or offer employees a chance to acquire shares in the company, providing employees with scope to benefit financially from growth in the value of the shares over time, including in cases where a company elects to go public or seeks fresh private investment.

There are also tax advantages that can apply under schemes such as the enterprise management incentive (EMI) share options scheme, which offer capital gains tax treatment on future growth in value in the shares granted to employees instead of a higher income tax charge.

CGT companies can use share options as a form of incentivising loyalty or performance. Options can be granted subject to time vested, or performance conditions which must be met before a right to sell the shares can be exercised. 'Leaver' provisions can also be included.