Possibly, although it’s pretty futile trying to put a source on any new drug (or any advance in modern science) - drugs developed in the UK could be based on key discoveries in America, Australia, France etc. and new techniques developed in America could be based on previous techniques developed in the UK.
Related to that, from where I’m sitting, I can throw a rock and hit the building of a company that’s developed bio-engineered human insulin that’s grown in oilseed plants.
Hehe… The UK’s Medical Research Council has won 27 Nobel Prizes, for amongst other things the discovery of penicillin (1945), the structure of DNA (1962), techiques for sequencing DNA (1980), development of MRI (2003), production of monoclonal antibodies (1984), elucidating the Krebs Cycle (1953).
Those are some pretty major breakthroughs, and they were funded by the taxpayer in the UK.
And that’s only the MRC, there are other funding bodies and charities.
Perhaps they aren’t major enough, though? Who knows?