3.7%. This is the expected percentage of the return on R&D investments made by major pharmaceutical companies. Almost seven percentage points less than the figure 
monster of 10.1% reached in 2010. This is underlined by the report drawn up, like every year, by the Center for Health Solutions of the company services company Deloitte.
A slight increase in the number of active substances pending approval might actually suggest that things are improving, but the trend continues to be downwards. In addition, the cost of developing a drug has increased from an average of $1.2 billion to $1.54 billion, and it takes pharmaceutical companies 14 years of work to launch a new product.
The same decline also for medium-sized companies, whose returns on investments fell from 17.4% in 2013 to 9.9% this year. According to Colin Terry, Deloitte's industry partner life sciences, the problem is that companies are no longer able to sell new products at the prices imposed in the past. Average peak sales for new launches would have dropped from $816 million in 2010 to $394 million this year, a decline by more than 11% year-over-year.
And the number of FDA approvals is also down. One way to improve R&D yields would be to focus on a few specific diseases. A trend already adopted by several large pharmaceutical companies that are discontinuing units, such as GlaxoSmithKline which has sold anticancer products to take Novartis vaccines. Larger companies, which have lower returns on investment than smaller companies, should therefore be more agile and flexible.
December 16, 2016 – Daily Health Industry
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