Drug R&D Spending
Who's Paying For This?
24/03/11 14:04 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Avik Roy at The Apothecary blog stated that comparative effectiveness research is necessary so physicians, researchers, and patients, know how different drugs stack up against each other, and the NIH should help fund this activity. S. Pelech comments that one of the dilemmas confronting drug comparative effectiveness research, apart from who is going to pay for it, is its usefulness once personalized medicine really starts to take hold. As the pharmaceutical industry increasingly integrates biomarker evaluation as a critical component of clinical trials, it will become less important of how the "average" person will react to two competing medicinal drugs for the same disease indication. Rather, it will matter more how well the drug matches the biomarker profile of the person who needs medication. Read More...
Not So Much 'R' and Not So Much 'D'
28/06/11 15:43 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Duff Wilson at The New York Times Prescriptions blog suggested that outside business deals are keeping the pipelines of the major drug companies healthy, instead of internal research projects as many companies such as Pfizer are slashing spending on R&D. Fitch Ratings indicates that primarily acquisition and licensing deals may allow the major pharma companies to reproduce meeting last year's level of 21 new drugs approved in the United States and Europe. S. Pelech laments 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 - large pharma had 25 of their new drugs approved in 2009, and 24 approved in 2008. According to Thomas Reuters for 2010, there was 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. Read More...