ROCHE "derrocha"...predicciones.

Roche CEO Severin Schwann is playing industry oracle and predicting a dramatic path forward for the life sciences industry in Europe. From a news conference held last week, here is what he’s predicting: healthcare spending cuts in Europe, triggered by the debt crisis in Greece will flush out the industry, leaving global generic as well as innovative drug makers among the survivors.

“We will see dramatic changes in the industry,” according to Schwann. “If pressure increases you will have suddenly winners and losers and you have a lot of enterprises that will be squeezed out.”

Survivors would be generic drugmakers with economies of scale needed to handle the volumes of the cheaper copies of branded drugs, as well as drugmakers that find medicines with improved outcomes compared with available drugs. Those in the middle, with little differentiation, would be wiped out. "I’m sure of that”, Schwan said.

Unlike Sanofi Aventis, Merck, Astrazeneca & Novartis, Roche has not (yet) entered biosimilars market. Schwan’s opinion is that biosimilars are less of a threat than pharmaceutical generics because the barriers to entry are much higher, in terms of cost, production and science.

“It’s a different ball game and we expect a much lesser penetration of biosimilars,” Schwan said.