- For every £1 spent on basic research a whopping £19 is spent on marketing, claim experts
- Current reward system discourages innovation, they add
Daily Mail, by Claire Bates, 8 August 2012
The
pharmaceutical industry is in crisis because companies are rewarded for
developing new drugs that have few clinical advantages over existing ones,
experts say.
Writing in
the British Medical Journal, Professor Donald Light from the University of
Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Joel Lexchin from York University in
Toronto, say this has discouraged innovation for the past five decades.
They
pointed to independent reviews that found between 85 and 90 per cent of all new
drugs developed over the past 50 years have provided few benefits and
considerable harms.
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| Has the pharmaceutical industry lost its way? Professor Light and Mr Lexchin say profits have been given priority over innovation |
They said
most research funds don't go towards finding breakthrough drugs but towards
developing scores of minor variations that produce a steady stream of profits.
Heavy promotion of these drugs can account for up to 80% of a nation’s drug
spending, they add.
The duo
warn that companies exaggerate research and development costs to lobby for more
protection from free market competition. Yet, according to an independent
analysis, the 1.3 per cent of revenues devoted to discovering new molecules
compares with an estimated 25 per cent spent on promotion.
This means
for every £1 spent on basic research a whopping £19 is spent on marketing.
Professor
Light and Mr Lexchin said urgent changes needed to be made to make the industry
focus on more cost effective and safer medicines.
They said
the first step should be to stop approving so many new drugs of little
therapeutic value.
'EU
countries are paying billions more than necessary for drugs that provide little
health gain because prices are not being set to reward new drugs in proportion
to their clinical value,' they say.
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They also
believe that regulators should be publicly funded and that new ways of
rewarding innovation should be considered.
'This
approach would save countries billions in healthcare costs and produce real
gains for people’s health', they conclude.
In a second
paper, researchers from the London School of Economics said drug manufacturers
should be made to demonstrate that their products are superior to existing
treatments.
However,
Stephen Whitehead, chief executive of the Association of the British
Pharmaceutical Industry, said: 'We strongly disagree with the claims made in
these papers.
'Medical
research has always rested on iterative and gradual innovation rather than
breakthrough advances which are very rare. If it were not for the incremental
improvements made in the treatment of HIV, the disease would still be terminal
rather than a manageable long term condition.
'The
pharmaceutical industry's medicines pipeline is promising with many new treatments
in development. But the discovery of medicines is an increasingly difficult
process as the cost of research and development continues to rise and
regulation becomes more onerous. In 2012, it costs on average over £1 billion
to develop a new medicine and takes between 12 and 15 years to develop.'
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