Therapy Analysis - Pharma R&D Annual Review
May is the time when Pharmaprojects' Annual Review of trends in pharmaceutical R&D is traditionally conducted. It is a useful opportunity to pause and reflect on how the industry is continuing to evolve, and is also the time when we take the annual snapshot of our data which provides a new timepoint for our Trends data module. In this article, we examine the data for 2009, look at how it has changed since 2008, and try to put the information into some sort of context.
In the world at large, a lot has changed in the past twelve months. Although there was mounting concern about the direction that the global economy was heading, few foresaw the momentous events of the banking crisis and the extent to which many of the major economies would slide into recession. In such testing times, pharmaceutical stocks often outperform the market, as the industry is regarded as to some extent recession-proof ("people will always get sick") and a relatively safe place to put one's money. But this does not mean that pharma companies are immune to the global downturn, quite the reverse. So the question we can look at here is, can any effect on the pharma pipeline itself be detected at this point?
At the highest level - the total number of drugs in active development (Graph 1), the answer would appear to be "no". There has been another significant rise in this figure for 2009, which at 9,605, is up a further 4.3% from the equivalent number in 2008. This increase is one of the bigger ones seen this decade, leaving aside last year's leap, which is anomalous as it was largely brought about due to data consolidation following our publisher Informa's acquisition of Citeline and its proprietary database of clinical trials, TrialTrove. Thus we would view such an increase as evidence of a certain degree of robustness in the pharma industry's pipelines. Given the huge expense of drug development, and the degree of company consolidation we are beginning to see (more of which later), it's heartening to see that, for now at least, the number of drugs in development is not suffering.
