Pharma R&D Annual Review 2010
Top therapies - cancer peaking?
...for the first time in the nearly twenty years over which we have been conducting these analyses, the inexorable rise of cancer R&D may have stalled...Moving to the changing therapeutic focus of the industry's pipeline, Graph 4 represents this broken down by therapeutic group (note that if a drug has activity in more than one therapeutic group it will be counted in both). This shows that, for the first time in the nearly twenty years over which we have been conducting these analyses, the inexorable rise of cancer R&D may have stalled. With 2,608 drugs, it is still the biggest therapeutic area, but this year 26.8% of drugs in R&D have some anticancer activity, compared to 28% last year. Cancer has been taking an ever bigger piece of the action, so it will be interesting to see if this is a blip or whether we have reached a limit on how large a slice of the R&D pie cancer can take.
The runner-up of the therapeutic groups remains neurological, whose share of R&D is roughly unchanged from last year (19.9% compared to 19.8%). In third place, anti-infectives have posted a 0.8% increase to 17.6%. Interestingly, 23.9% of drugs in the pipeline can be categorized as biotechnological agents - another share which has been rising year-on-year but appears to be approaching a plateau
Most of these trends are also reflected in the Top 25 table of the 219 individual therapeutic categories used to classify drugs in Pharmaprojects/Pipeline. This reveals the first ever declines in the two biggest anticancer categories, while upturns in vaccine development and antivirals appear to be contributing to the rise for anti-infectives. One of the big growth areas of recent years, antidiabetics, continues to increase, despite, as mentioned earlier, an increasingly-crowded marketplace. Other noteworthy trends in the table include the continuing decline of asthma R&D, which was in the top ten two years ago; similarly gene therapy is just hanging on in the Top 25. At its peak, gene therapy actually reached the number three position, its demise since testament to the failure of this strategy thus far to deliver tangible results on its early promise.
