Therapy Analysis - Pharma R&D Annual Review
Therapeutic areas - diabetes pipeline still fattening
Despite the varied therapeutic development, it is still cancer which grabs the lion's share of the industry's attention..A review of the most popular therapeutic areas for pharma R&D in 2007 appears in Table 3. This shows the two major anticancer categories posting further increases, although at a slightly slower rate than last year. The big winner this year is once again diabetes, which shows an almost 15% rise in R&D over the past twelve months. Interestingly, two related therapy areas, symptomatic antidiabetic and hypolipaemic/antiatherosclerosis, also report significant rises, highlighting that this area of metabolic diseases is currently very hot. Losers in the Top 10 this year are asthma and vaccine development, although it was generally a good year for biological R&D. In particular, monoclonal antibodies are proving increasingly popular, with two categories entering the Top 25 for the first time this year.
Despite the varied therapeutic development, it is still cancer which grabs the lion's share of the industry's attention. This year, a full 28% of all drugs in R&D are under development for some kind of use in cancer. This puts anticancer drugs well ahead of the second largest of the 17 therapeutic groups, neurologicals, with 20.5%. The Pharmaprojects Therapeutic Classification System, which was developed and enhanced from the EPhMRA system, contains 218 individual therapeutic codes arranged in 17 broad categories, and is continuously reviewed so that it reflects the nature of current R&D.
