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Europe Is Ahead Of U.S. In Global Drug Discovery

August 27, 2009

A new analysis of 20 years of data contradicts previously published claims that United States pharmaceutical companies are improved in health innovators than their European counterparts, and questions whether Americans actually benefit from the higher prices they pay for crowd prescription medications. The re-analysis by Donald W. Light, PhD, a professor of social medicine and able to compare health systems at the UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic medicine, appears in the current Health Affairs-web exclusive.

The study shows that, dollar for dollar, European pharmaceutical researchers outdo their American colleagues in “innovative performance or the introduction of first-in-class, biotech, and orphan products,” a finding that could consider prodigious implications for the running water debate over the cost of reforming health care in the United States.

“One implication is simply that American inquiry teams need to figure without why they are not as productive,” aforesaid Light, who is moreover the current Lorry Lokey Visiting Professor at Stanford University. “Another is that robust European research and development takes courtyard at with regard to half the U.S. prices for patent-protected drugs. Without jeopardizing domestic research or the development of new drugs, U.S. drug prices could be touching half their current condition, that would help significantly to grasp down rising health care costs and the amount of out-of-pocket costs that consumers have to pay for medications.”

In his re-analysis, Light examined data attached new chemical entities (NCEs) introduced betwixt 1982 and 2003. NCEs are drugs introduced in a majority of the creation’sitting largest markets. He compared the percentage of the drug examination funds invested by companies to the percentage of NCEs credited to the United States, Europe and Japan to measure each area’s investigation productivity. For precedent, an circle that received 33 percent of research investment should be expected to produce 33 percent of NCEs, a ratio of one-to-one (1.0).

He found that while the United States’ share of research funding increased dramatically between 1990 and 2000, its research productivity remained at a relatively constant ratio of over 0.75. Over the same epoch, Europe’session proportion of research funding plummeted, but its research productivity ratio increased from 0.99 to 1.17.

Along with this growing productivity gap, Light points loudly that little ground of belief exists to support claims that principally new drugs are of high quality or “of importance” to patients. He cites the example of “me-too” drugs, in the same state being of the kind which Nexium, Lipitor, and new cancer drugs that generate copious revenues at high prices except generally take not been clinically proven to be prevalent to existing drugs. According to Light, this allows drug companies to generate profits at the cost of patients who get little if somewhat do good to from the development of these drugs.

“The real change crisis for patients is not the decline in the discovery of recently made known molecules, but that the vast majority of new drugs offer few therapeutic advantages and greater risks than even now available medications,” Light said. “High prices enable companies to spend 2.5 times more on marketing than on research and expansion. It’s a system that rewards better marketing over discovery, introduction of novelty and therapeutic appraise.”

The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) is the nation’sitting largest free-standing public health sciences university with more than 5,500 students attending the state’s three medical schools, its only dental school, a confer a degree upon drill of biomedical sciences, a school of health connected professions, a educate of nursing and its only indoctrinate of public health, attached five campuses. Last year, there were more than two million patient visits to UMDNJ facilities and faculty at campuses in Newark, New Brunswick/Piscataway, Scotch Plains, Camden and Stratford. UMDNJ operates University Hospital, a Level I Trauma Center in Newark, and University Behavioral HealthCare, a mental health and addiction services network.

Source: UMDNJ

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Written by Samanta · Filed Under Pharmacy Industry News