Pharma 2020: Supplying the future - video transcript
The pharmaceutical industry is a growing industry, and in fact by 2020, we’re expecting the industry to be worth $1.3 trillion. The pharmaceutical industry is going through an immense period of turmoil at the moment. The regulatory agenda has required the industry to focus very much on safety. That means that the industry is investing more in bringing new drugs to the marketplace through longer and more complex clinical trials. Some of the good news for the industry is that the new medicines are allowing people to live a lot longer with chronic diseases, in fact diseases that would have killed them in earlier years. The industry also is having to supply drugs into emerging markets, where in fact diseases of the west are now becoming quite commonplace. The issues that we have with hypertension, obesity, diabetes etcetera, are now becoming much more global.
One of the issues that the pharmaceutical industry really has to get over at the moment, is the issue of the decrease in productivity of the R&D section of the industry. In fact, we are spending a lot more money in R&D, but we have a lot less output. That’s resulted in a patent cliff, where drugs in fact are losing their patent protection, and we’ve found that in fact, in 2011, this cliff will be the steepest ever, and the pharmaceutical industry have to overcome this loss of revenues.
Now when we look at the supply chain, that is, the business of getting the drug to the patient, either via the hospital or the pharmacy, what we’re finding is that the drug industry is challenged in a number of ways. The molecules that they are producing are different. They are no longer simple white powders that have long shelf lives, and the pharmaceutical industry is being asked to get biologicals and other medicines which have a short shelf life and very difficult requirements, into patients and hospitals etcetera, using a model which perhaps is not fit for the future.
US healthcare reform, or if you like, Obama-care, as it’s nicknamed, is going to provide quite some challenge to the pharmaceutical industry, because we are now going to have to prove value for money to the payers and the providers, and demonstrate a positive outcome for our drugs. This means that the pharmaceutical industry really has to get much more involved in the delivery of the medicines. They’re going to have to prove that the medicines work. This will require the pharmaceutical industry to become more integral in the delivery of healthcare, it’ll require them to help to make sure patients take their drugs and make sure they take them as prescribed, and it’ll also require the industry to get closer to understand whether the drugs have worked for not.
So in summary, the pharmaceutical industry has a significant set of challenges between now and 2020. The pharmaceutical industry’s supply chain really has to become an integral part of the delivery of healthcare. The pharmaceutical industry has to prove positive outcomes from the drugs that they deliver to patients, and the industry has to get much more closely involved with the payer, the provider and the regulator.
