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A senior pharmaceutical industry executive who oversaw development of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine has been selected to lead the UK government’s new health data service.
Dr Melanie Ivarsson was on Monday named chief executive of the Health Data Research Service (HDRS), which will give researchers a single access point to NHS datasets.
Ivarsson previously served as chief development officer at US biotech group Moderna, where she called on Britain to cut bureaucracy to catch up with peer countries in developing trials that could benefit patients.
At Moderna, Ivarsson was in charge of clinical development, taking the company’s messenger RNA (mRNA) jab from early testing through to large-scale clinical trials and regulatory approval.
Before joining the biotech, Ivarsson served as head of global clinical operations at Takeda following its acquisition of Shire, and previously spent nine years at Pfizer in clinical development. Earlier in her career, she held roles in US drugmaker Eli Lilly’s early clinical development group.
The HDRS will provide access to NHS data under wider government plans to improve data flows and capitalise on information held by the publicly funded health system. Ivarsson’s appointment was first reported by the FT.
The most contentious part of the service, which is set to go live by the end of this year and be fully operational by 2030, concerns the pricing of medical data.
Experts have warned that charging pharma companies and research organisations for access to private medical information will fuel public concern over profiteering.
Last year health minister Zubir Ahmed said the UK should “leverage” its new health data service for the “benefit of the Treasury coffers”, as well as accelerating the discovery of new treatments for NHS patients.
Government officials previously stressed that the HDRS would safeguard patient privacy through tight access to data, strong encryption systems and monitored secure environments.
The HDRS is being set up with about £600mn of funding from the UK government and the Wellcome Trust, a biomedical charity.
In November Baroness Nicola Blackwood, chair of Genomics England, was appointed as chair of the HDRS, which has been approved as a government company. The service will be run from the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire.
Lord Patrick Vallance, science and technology minister, said Ivarsson’s CV “speaks for itself, not least her leadership of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine programme which formed an important part of the fight against Covid-19”.
“The Health Data Research Service will be instrumental in ensuring that health data is used to improve health, speeding up discoveries and providing information to enhance healthcare delivery,” he added in a statement.
On Tuesday, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the UK’s drugs regulator, said it received 878 clinical trial applications between January and November 2025, up 9 per cent on the same period in 2024.
