Therapy Analysis - Pharma R&D Annual Review
Therapeutic areas - diabetes and analgesia outperform growth
Those in the Top 10which therefore post a relative decline are the categories for general Cardiovascular agents and Cognition enhancers...
A review of the most popular of the 218 therapeutic areas for pharma R&D appears in Table 3. It shows the two main anticancer therapeutic categories still heading the list, with increases between them averaging just over the mean growth rate of the total pipeline. Overall, 27.5% of all drugs in R&D are under development for some kind of cancer; the corresponding figure was 28% last year. Thus it appears that after many years of cancer therapeutics taking an ever-increasingly large slice of the pie, this growth may have at last peaked.
With the overall pipeline reported to be up by 19.1%, this gives us a yardstick by which to measure which therapeutic areas have outperformed the average. By this metric, diabetes research continues to advance, with the Antidiabetic therapeutic class up by 27.7%. The fourth placed category, non-NSAID analgesics, has also risen more than the mean, its 450 active projects up 26.8% from its 2007 figure. The antiinflammatory category beats them both with a 32.8% jump.
Those in the Top 10 which therefore post a relative decline are the categories for general Cardiovascular agents and Cognition enhancers.
Of the 17 broader therapeutic areas, Neurologicals come in second after Anticancers, with a growth of 20.3% in active R&D products and Anti infectives in third place, with a 16.1% increase. This year, 23.2% of drugs come under at least one of the biotech therapeutic categories, up slightly from 22.8% at the same time in 2007.
