Drug, Patent and Hype: Quo Vadis Pharma Innovation?

 A recent research report reveals, though the pharmaceutical companies in the United States since mid 2000 have spent over US$ 50 billion every year to discover new drugs, they have very rarely been able to invent something, which can be called significant improvement over already existing ones.

As per available reports, from the year 2000  to 2010, the US-FDA, on an average, approved just 24 new drugs per year. This number is a sharp decline from the same of 1990, when on an average 31 new drugs were approved per year.

These studies throw open some important questions to ponder:

• What is then the real issue with pharma innovation?
• Is it declining quality or quantity (number)?
• What impacts the patients more?

Top 10 DTC Pharma Advertisers - H1 2013

The U.S. is one of only two countries that allow direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of pharmaceuticals, and opinions on whether doing so is a good idea are all over the place, even among doctors. Physicians complain that television ads overstate benefits and lead patients to pressure them to prescribe drugs they may not need. But they also acknowledge that the promotions can deflate the stigma of receiving treatment for some conditions, depression for example, and that is a good thing. Critics complain that drugmakers spend more on marketing than on research and development, a good soundbite in its own right, but one that is hard to verify.

Drugmakers put much more money into other forms of marketing, like detailing to doctors, and DTC advertising has been on the wane in recent years; it fell 11.5% to $3.47 billion in 2012. Still, Nielsen, which supplied the advertising numbers for this report, estimates an average of 80 drug ads air every hour of every day on American television. The top 10 pharma advertisers did spend $1.5 billion in the first 6 months of 2013, which is not exactly chump change.

Whatever your opinion, it is always fascinating to see who those top pharma advertisers are and which products they chose to push. And it can be fun to watch their ads. We present here the top 10 pharma advertisers for the first half of 2013, the most recent data available from Nielsen. We've included financial data on the top two or three products that they advertised. We also have links to the TV ads, courtesy to our readers from AdPharm, a company that tracks them for the advertising and pharmaceutical industries.

Read the report below:

1  Pfizer

2  Eli Lilly

3  AbbVie

4  Merck

5  Amgen

6  AstraZeneca

7  Allergan

8  Otsuka Pharmaceutical

9  GlaxoSmithKline

10  Johnson & Johnson

Market Access is Dead

 
Pharmaceutical Executive | By: John Glasspool
 

Paradigms change when questions emerge that the old paradigm can no longer answer. Market access has become a buzz word, as access to markets is as significant a hurdle to product uptake as registration itself. Initially a topic for pharmaceutical companies concerned about sales volume, it now affects all aspects of healthcare. The current understanding of market access will undergo a fundamental shift in perspective, away from a company-centered toward a patient-centric view of the problem. This column identifies several forces that challenge the current understanding of market access and lobbies for a comprehensive approach that aims to address the needs of all stakeholders, with a primary focus on what creates value for patients. 

What killed market access? 

 

There are four reasons why the current approach to market access is doomed to fail: