The astronomical prices of new medicines make certain treatments increasingly inaccessible for
patients as the medicines are unaffordable for national healthcare reimbursement systems, even
in the Netherlands.
There is growing awareness among EU governments
, including the Dutch
Government, that it is ultimately the tax payer that bears the costs of medicines, sometimes twice
or thrice over, because of the public reimbursement system, and funding for academics institutes
where basic research is conducted, tax incentives and grants made to stimulate innovative drug
development, and public investments in spin-off companies from universities.
Profitable pharmaceutical companies
Pharmaceutical companies are some of the most profitable companies in the world, even
more profitable than technology and on par with banking, according to a BBC report and
Forbes, which lists biotech companies, generic pharmaceutical companies and major pharma
companies in the top ten most profitable industries.
By revenue and profit the Swiss Novartis (2018 Novartis reported 12.6 billion dollars profit
on 53 billion dollars in revenue ) and the American Merck (2018 Merck & Co reported
6.2 billion dollars profit on 42 billion dollars in revenue) and the British AstraZenenca
(2018 AstraZeneca reported 2.2 billion dollars profit on 22 billion dollars in revenue) are
in the top 10 of the richest pharma companies
Empty pipelines of the large pharmaceutical companies
Over the past decade the pharma industry has not had much success in getting approval for new
molecular entities produced from in-house R&D. According to a Deloitte report published in 2018,
based on data from 12 large biopharma companies, R&D returns are expected to continue declining
in the coming years due to the empty late-stage drug pipelines.
In an effort to compensate for their weak pipelines, large pharmaceutical companies try to access
external innovation by either buying up small and medium sized biotechnology companies that
have promising medicines or therapies in development, or by increasing their cooperation with
the academic world.
The industry’s shift to increasingly collaborate with academia’ has resulted
in publicly-funded universities playing a larger role in applied research for drug discovery, and the
expansion of publicly-funded drug development programmes. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), for example,
‘has decentralised half of its R&D spending into the hands of academics and biotech companies",
through a GSK programme called Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc)
Additionally, MSD announced a US$1.25bn cut for in-house R&D in 2014 in order to establish new
headhunter centres in Boston, San Francisco, London and Shanghai. From these bases, a network of
scouts look for innovative drug discovery programmes and promising new biology being undertaken
by local academics and faculties.
Other pharma companies, such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson,
GlaxoSmithKline and Bayer, have already established such centres in the same areas. (Más)
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