Therapy Analysis - Pharma R&D Annual Review
Total R&D projects - on the up again
The number of drugs in active development in mid-April, the timepoint which Pharmaprojects has used for its annual survey since 1980, stood at 7,737, up from 7,406 at the same point in 2006. This would appear to indicate an end to a period of stagnation, as Graph 1 illustrates. It shows that after a period where the figure was fairly flat in the late nineties, the early part of this decade saw a time of pipeline expansion, but this had plateaued out in recent years. The upturn seen now will provide welcome relief for those who feared that the paucity of new drug launches was strangling pipeline growth, and might even cause it to go into reverse. Yet this increase comes after 2006 saw another relatively thin year in terms of new drugs successfully reaching the market.
