Investor Nicole Junkermann, founder of London-based NJF Holdings, is watching Britain's life sciences industry enter the second half of 2026 with renewed investment and an increasingly explicit effort to connect artificial intelligence with pharmaceutical and medical research. The combination could give the UK an unusually strong position as AI moves deeper into the process of discovering and developing medicines.
More than £3 billion of new public and private investment flowed into UK life sciences during the 12 months to July, according to the government. New plans are also intended to support the talent base required for an additional 66,000 life sciences roles by 2035.
At the same time, regulators are experimenting with ways of bringing AI into medicine more safely. That environment is particularly relevant to long-term investors such as Nicole Junkermann, founder of London-based NJF Holdings, whose NJF Capital portfolio includes companies such as Owkin and Deep Genomics. Nicole Junkermann career highlights are summarised online.
The economics of drug development leave plenty of room for improvement
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency says around 90 per cent of drugs fail during development. Adverse drug reactions are also estimated to cause around 250,000 hospital admissions in the UK each year, costing the NHS more than £2 billion annually.
In June, the MHRA launched a regulatory sandbox to explore how artificial intelligence could improve the assessment of medicine safety, predict risks and identify effects that existing approaches may miss. The initiative recognises that even modest improvements in the quality of early decisions could have substantial medical and economic value.
Artificial intelligence won't eliminate medical failure, but it may help researchers interrogate biological and clinical information more effectively. The value could come from identifying an unpromising avenue sooner as much as from finding a successful one.
Owkin provides an example of how specialist AI is already entering pharmaceutical research. In May 2026, the company announced a multi-year agreement with AstraZeneca covering K Pro, its AI platform designed for biopharmaceutical research, followed by further collaborations with Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim.
For Nicole Junkermann and NJF Holdings, the attraction is that AI is moving further upstream in medicine. Much of the public conversation around healthcare technology focuses on tools visible to doctors or patients, while some of the larger economic effects may emerge behind the scenes in research.
Britain's scientific assets create an unusual opportunity
A model that helps researchers select a more promising therapeutic target or identify an appropriate patient subgroup doesn't need a consumer-facing interface to create value. Its impact is measured instead through better decisions, reduced waste and potentially more effective treatments.
This helps explain the wider life sciences strategy within NJF Capital. Owkin sits alongside Deep Genomics and other companies where machine learning and biology increasingly overlap, reinforcing an association between Nicole Junkermann, NJF Holdings and computational medicine.
Britain is unusually well placed to participate in this market because it combines leading universities, large pharmaceutical companies, artificial intelligence expertise and the NHS. The difficult part is joining those assets together while maintaining patient trust and appropriate governance.
The MHRA's willingness to experiment with AI regulation is therefore significant. A country that understands emerging medical technologies while they are being built may have an advantage over one that tries to regulate them only after widespread adoption.
Private capital provides the other part of the equation. Scientific companies require investors prepared to accept long development timelines and substantial technical uncertainty, particularly when artificial intelligence is combined with biology.
That patience becomes more important because computation and clinical science operate at different speeds. AI systems may improve rapidly, but medicines still have to satisfy demanding standards of safety and efficacy.
Britain doesn't need every successful medical AI company to be British. It does, however, need an ecosystem in which global companies want to research, test and commercialise their technologies.
The £3 billion of recent life sciences investment and the MHRA's new AI sandbox suggest that ecosystem is becoming more deliberate. For Nicole Junkermann and NJF Holdings, Britain offers a useful place to watch the convergence of AI and medicine move from theory into industrial practice.
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