Not So Much 'R' and Not So Much 'D'
28/06/11 15:43 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 15:43.
It's a very sad situation that at a time when we are learning so much about the mechanisms of human disease that our progress on actually treating them is steadily waning. This is especially disturbing as the aging population in developed countries is exploding and the resulting health care costs will become unmanageable. Much of the fault lies with the biomedical research community itself in where it has chosen to focus its allocated resources.
Industry serves as the principal source of biomedical R&D, spending more than all government and charitable organizations combined. Large pharma has borne most the costs, largely from the proceeds from the high prices of their medications. When their profits decline, so too does their ability to fund R&D.
Large pharma had 21 of their new drugs approved in 2010, but this is lower than the 25 approved in 2009 and the 24 approved in 2008. The prospects for an improvement in the rate of new drug approvals in the next few years continues to be bleak, especially with the most recent slashes in R&D spending by big pharma. According to Thomas Reuters for 2010, these include a 47% drop in phase I human trials, more than a 50% decline in phase II studies, and a doubling of the rate of early termination of phase III human trials.
While large pharma has depended on the biotech industry to provide new drug candidates through licensing and acquisition, the biotech industry itself is in very difficult shape. As a vendor of proteomics services for the last 12 years to over 1350 clients, at Kinexus Bioinformatics we have had a very good vantage point to monitor R&D in academia, the biotech industry and large pharma. There's clearly a large storm brewing and a lot of stakeholders are going to be very unhappy.
Link to the original blog post.
It's a very sad situation that at a time when we are learning so much about the mechanisms of human disease that our progress on actually treating them is steadily waning. This is especially disturbing as the aging population in developed countries is exploding and the resulting health care costs will become unmanageable. Much of the fault lies with the biomedical research community itself in where it has chosen to focus its allocated resources.
Industry serves as the principal source of biomedical R&D, spending more than all government and charitable organizations combined. Large pharma has borne most the costs, largely from the proceeds from the high prices of their medications. When their profits decline, so too does their ability to fund R&D.
Large pharma had 21 of their new drugs approved in 2010, but this is lower than the 25 approved in 2009 and the 24 approved in 2008. The prospects for an improvement in the rate of new drug approvals in the next few years continues to be bleak, especially with the most recent slashes in R&D spending by big pharma. According to Thomas Reuters for 2010, these include a 47% drop in phase I human trials, more than a 50% decline in phase II studies, and a doubling of the rate of early termination of phase III human trials.
While large pharma has depended on the biotech industry to provide new drug candidates through licensing and acquisition, the biotech industry itself is in very difficult shape. As a vendor of proteomics services for the last 12 years to over 1350 clients, at Kinexus Bioinformatics we have had a very good vantage point to monitor R&D in academia, the biotech industry and large pharma. There's clearly a large storm brewing and a lot of stakeholders are going to be very unhappy.
Link to the original blog post.