Therapy Analysis - Pharma R&D Annual Review
Annual review of pharma R&D shows biggest rise in overall pipeline size ever, but disappointingly few new active substances reaching the market
Pharmaprojects' 2008 annual review of trends in pharmaceutical R&D appears to show the biggest rise in the size of the overall pipeline ever recorded, with the year-on-year change a staggering 19.1%, there are now 9,217 drugs currently in development. Despite this however, it was another disappointing year for new active substances (NASs) reaching the market.
A number of internal reasons may account for the slightly overoptimistic view of the current state of R&D. This is, to a certain extent, due to the improved data capturing by Pharmaprojects. At the end of 2006, Informa Healthcare, the publishers of Pharmaprojects, acquired Citeline, the publishers of TrialTrove, the world’s foremost repository of clinical trials information. From June 2007, the editorial teams of Pharmaprojects and TrialTrove began collaborating and matching their data on active drugs. This enabled Pharmaprojects to not only draw on the large resources of the TrialTrove editorial team, but to plug some gaps in drug coverage that the exercise exposed. This has led to an overall improvement in the quality of the data offered by Pharmaprojects, but does make some of this year’s trends more difficult to analyse. We believe that despite this distortion, there is a genuine uplift in the amount of R&D underway and that the increase shown in Graph 1 cannot be solely attributed to the improved reporting procedures.
