Forbes | Matthew Herper, Forbes Staff
Last summer, after writing a profile of Bernard
Munos, who has made it his calling to understand what
goes into pharmaceutical innovation, I posted two very simple tables based on
Munos’ data: of the drug companies that had approved the most drugs
over the past decade, and over the past sixty years. I argued at the time (and still feel) that this is a pretty good
surrogate for how good these companies were at being pharmaceutical firms —
because a drug company’s main job is to invent new medicines and get them to
patients.
Anyway, when I contacted Munos about a profile I was writing of the company
that topped the ten-year list (that’s Novartis, and you can read the story in the
current issue of Forbes) he wrote back with measures
over a different time frame — 15 years. Novartis also winds up being tops in
that window, too, with 21 new drugs (or new molecular entities, in pharma
jargon) compared to 16 for Merck. I thought it was worth laying out those numbers too. What’s interesting
is that the analysis bridges that long-term time period and the past decade,
when much of the drug business has been in an innovation drought. And however
you do it, the same names end up near the top: not only Novartis but also
J&J and Merck. I’ll have more on this data soon — including how much
companies are spending per drug. For now I just want to thank Munos and his
InnoThink Center for Research in Biomedical Innovation for providing this data.
Company
|
Number of
Drugs
|
Novartis
|
21
|
16
|
|
J&J
|
15
|
14
|
|
13
|
|
11
|
|
11
|
|
Lilly
|
11
|
10
|
|
Abbott (1)
|
9
|
9
|
|
9
|
Source: Bernard Munos, InnoThink Center for
Research in Biomedical Innovation