A £12.5 million programme is paying automotive suppliers to reinvent themselves as medical technology manufacturers, a University of Warwick spin-out is turning decades of engineering research into a national clinical trials platform and the country’s flagship life sciences event has chosen the birthplace of the motor industry as its home for a second year running. The West Midlands built its wealth on driving. Increasingly, it is building its future on life sciences, using exactly the same skills.

It is easy to think of the automotive sector and life sciences as separate worlds, one built around steel, welding and assembly lines, the other around laboratories, clinical trials and regulatory approval. In the West Midlands that distinction is starting to blur. The region that gave the world mass production is now channelling that same manufacturing expertise, precision engineering and supply chain discipline into medical technology, diagnostics and clinical research. It is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate regional strategy, and 2026 is the year it is starting to show results.

Paying Automotive Suppliers to Become Medtech Suppliers

In October 2025, the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) and Mayor Richard Parker launched the Supply Chain Transition programme, backed by £12.5 million secured from government, with a further £2.5 million from the WMCA for skills training and apprenticeships. The programme exists to help manufacturing SMEs across the region, many of them long-standing automotive suppliers, diversify into new high-growth markets, among them health and medical technology, alongside electric vehicles and battery technology, aerospace, clean tech and digital technologies. It includes a £6 million research and development grant fund and is delivered by the Supply Smarter West Midlands consortium, which brings together the Manufacturing Technology Centre, WMG at the University of Warwick, Birmingham City University, Coventry University and the University of Wolverhampton.

Richard Parker described the thinking behind it bluntly: “Manufacturing is still the beating heart of the West Midlands economy, it’s in our DNA. But we’re ever evolving as technology transforms what we make and how we make it.” He added that the ambition was nothing less than to “reclaim our status as the workshop of the world.” One of the three physical sites underpinning the wider Investment Zone, the Birmingham Knowledge Quarter running from Birmingham City and Aston universities through to Nechells and Aston, is focused specifically on investment and jobs in the health and medical technology sector. Health tech and med tech is treated by the programme as a priority cluster in its own right, with participating businesses supported by Birmingham City University and connected to NHS Hospital Trusts to help solve product adoption challenges across respiratory, dental and surgical solutions.

The mechanism is already visible in practice, even where firms are still finding their footing. Metal Assemblies Ltd, a West Bromwich pressing and welding specialist that has supplied stampings and assemblies to Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and BMW since 1955, joined the programme after recognising that, in the words of Business Development Manager Lorraine Beattie, “the automotive industry suffers from highs and lows, and we needed to fill those voids.” The company is now exploring opportunities in rail and light electric vehicle supply chains using the same pressing and welding capabilities built up over decades of automotive work, the same underlying logic the programme applies to its health and medical technology cluster: engineering skill is transferable, provided a business has the roadmap and the introductions to make the jump.

An Automotive Engineering Faculty Building a Medtech Trials Platform

The clearest evidence that this transfer works at a more advanced level comes from the University of Warwick, home to Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), the department whose engineering and manufacturing research underpins much of the region’s automotive and advanced manufacturing sector. In January 2026, Warwick launched VerIQ Limited, a spin-out company built to accelerate the design, initiation and delivery of clinical trials for medical devices and health technologies, formed in partnership with University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust.

Dr Tim Hart, Director of Warwick Innovations, said VerIQ “harnesses the success and strength of our scientific leadership and showcases the impact that academic-industry collaboration can achieve,” adding that the aim was to “help position the region and UK at the forefront of global medtech innovation and evidence generation.” Professor Andy Metcalfe, an orthopaedic surgeon at UHCW and VerIQ’s Chief Medical Officer, framed the goal in more direct terms: “We need to deliver world-class studies that makes the UK the first place to come to for medical innovation.” VerIQ’s initial focus is on orthopaedics and wider medtech trials, streamlining study set-up, participant recruitment and data quality in partnership with NHS teams, work that draws directly on the same engineering-led research culture that has made WMG a fixture of the UK automotive supply chain for decades.

The Life Sciences Calendar Now Runs Through the Motor City

That crossover is not lost on the organisers of the UK’s national life sciences showcase. Life Sciences Week 2026 will run from 21 to 25 September, with its opening event once again hosted in the West Midlands, following an inaugural year that drew more than 2,000 delegates. Professor Neil Hanley, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Birmingham, credited the event with helping launch the Birmingham Health Innovation Campus, adding that the campus had already received a ministerial visit since opening. The 2026 programme will centre on pharmaceutical and biotech innovation, medical technology and diagnostics, academic research partnerships and investor engagement.

The choice of venue is not incidental. Organisers have repeatedly pointed to the West Midlands’ manufacturing and engineering legacy, the same legacy built on more than a century of car making, as one of the region’s central advantages for life sciences growth, alongside its universities, research institutions and central location. It is a fitting detail that Life Sciences Week’s own Event Managing Director, Amy Deakin, began her career in automotive design, working on projects for Volkswagen, McLaren, Bentley and Jaguar Land Rover, before moving into the life sciences sector. Her career path is, in miniature, exactly the transition the region’s economic strategy is now trying to encourage at scale.

One Set of Skills, Two Industries

What connects a pressing and welding firm in West Bromwich, a clinical trials spin-out in Coventry and a national conference programme in Birmingham is not luck. It is the recognition, shared by government funders, universities and event organisers alike, that the skills which built the West Midlands’ automotive industry, precision manufacturing, rigorous testing, supply chain discipline and large-scale engineering collaboration, are directly applicable to building medical devices, running clinical trials and manufacturing diagnostics. The region is not abandoning its industrial heritage to build a life sciences sector. It is repurposing it. Whether that translates into a genuinely diversified regional economy will depend on how many more manufacturers follow Metal Assemblies’ example over the next few years, but the infrastructure, the funding and the institutional will to make it happen are now firmly in place.

Sources include the West Midlands Combined Authority, Business Growth West Midlands, the University of Warwick, ITIJ, and Life Sciences Week.