Therapy Analysis - Pharma R&D Annual Review
Top pharmacologies - angiogenesis still flavour of the month
Table 4 shows the most popular pharmacologies being employed in the pharmaceutical pipeline at present. While the non-specific immunostimulant category distinguishes itself by becoming the first pharmacology to have its pipeline size move into four figures, of more note is the increasing popularity of angiogenesis inhibition as a drug development strategy. Led by the success of bevacizumab (Avastin), the drug for which we receive more information here in Pharmaprojects than any other (there is new information added to its profile almost every day), angiogenesis inhibitors are still clearly the 'flavour of the month', leapfrogging apoptosis inhibitors this year with a 31% increase in their pipeline size. As would be expected, strategies related to oncological drug development dominate the list overall, reinforcing the pre-eminence of this therapeutic area in modern drug development.
It is worth noting that there a few 'oddities' in this chart this year, caused by a project which is currently underway relating to synchronization of Pharmaprojects' data with data from our sister database of clinical trials, TrialTrove. It is this which has caused the temporary move up the list of some of the other broader categories such as Proteolytic enzyme inhibitor and Tyrosine kinase inhibitor - this will be resolved shortly.
The cumulative number of pharmacological drug development strategies has now reached 2,122, up from 2,028 last year. There has been a similar increase in the number of drug protein targets which have been investigated during the 29 years which Pharmaprojects has been tracking drug R&D. This now stands at 1,752, up from 1,650 last year. This is probably a more reliable way to track innovation in pharmaceutical R&D, so it is encouraging to see this figure up by more than 100 in the past twelve months, posting a 6.2% rise, which is slightly up from the previous year. This is an encouraging final statistic, since long-term, it is the development of innovative drugs which must be the prime driver for the industry's continued success.
