Pharma R&D Annual Review 2010
May is the time when Citeline Drug Intelligence's Annual Review of trends in pharmaceutical R&D is traditionally conducted. It is a useful opportunity to pause and reflect on the how the industry is continuing to evolve, and is also the time when we take the annual snapshot our data which provides a new timepoint for our Trends data module in one of our database products, Pharmaprojects. In this article, we examine the data for 2010, look at how it has changed since 2009, and try to put the information into some sort of context.
Additionally, as Pharmaprojects celebrates its 30th birthday, we look briefly at the seismic shifts which have occurred in both the pharma industry and the way it shares information on its activities with the wider world. In tracking pharma R&D for the last three decades, we are ideally placed to observe not only the changes in the way in which drugs are developed and the size and shapes of R&D pipelines, but also the extraordinary information revolution which has so greatly affected all of our lives.
This year has seen another increase in the total number of drugs reported in the overall pipeline. At 9,737, this year's figure is up 1.4%, a relatively small rise compared to the 4.3% increase observed from 2008 to 2009, but nevertheless continuing the upward trend seen in recent years. There was considerable variation during the course of the year, with the figure being over the 'magic' 10,000 mark for much of the third quarter of 2009, demonstrating the seasonality of this metric (there tends to be a spike after the peak conference season). While such figures can also be heavily influenced by changing editorial practices and priorities, it is tempting to view this as evidence of the pharma industry exhibiting a degree of insulation from the financial downturn. Eighteen months on from the global banking crisis, the traditionally recession-proof pharma industry seems to be holding up fairly well to the extent that overall pipelines have not shrunk significantly. While it is impossible to draw any definite conclusions, in a year in which many people working in the industry have lost their jobs, it seems as if R&D might still be relatively untouched by the economic difficulties. However, as we shall see later on in this analysis, the picture for an industry in which new molecules are the lifeblood may be more mixed and complex than first appearances suggest.
