Big Pharma hits another ad-spending high in 2015, thanks to Novo, Valeant and more

Throw another ad spending title on pharma’s growing pile.

Advertising Age’s annual ranking of the 200 leading national advertisers in the U.S. found that pharma industry spending rose more than any other category, increasing overall by 15.6% last year.

And it was way ahead of the rest, too. Travel came in second at 10.1%, while the apparel industry came in third with total ad spending rising by 6.9%. Spending across all categories increased almost unanimously; only the food category dropped, down 2.7%.

And on Ad Age’s top 10 list of the fastest-growing spenders for the year, half were pharma companies. Novo Nordisk ranked highest of those at No. 4 with a 195% spending increase year-over-year to reach $261 million. Valeant Pharmaceuticals was No. 5 with an 88% increase to $441 million, followed by GlaxoSmithKline at No. 6 with a 56% increase to $948 million in ad spending.

Pharm Exec's Top 50 Companies 2016

Pharm Exec’s latest annual listing of the top biopharmaceutical players—now in its 16th year—looks placid on the surface. But a restive marketplace and important transitions taking place in the larger business model of healthcare augers poorly for those inclined to read our numbers as a successful adjustment to the world as it is—because it’s a sure bet that world is going to be different. 

Though the companies represented in the top 50 of global sales leaders have remained remarkably stable over time, their relative positioning within the list continues to shift. This reflects the importance that product launches and innovative campaigns to grow existing medications at every stage of the product life cycle now play in building a sales advantage against truly brutal levels of competition. It helps explain why Pfizer resumes its position this year as the industry’s prescription sales leader, displacing Novartis in the No. 1 ranking by widening its therapeutic franchise in vaccines—a segment that Novartis recently abandoned—with a strong performance for its multi-indication pneumoccocal preventive, Prevnar 13.

MIT prototype machine could make in-house drug production possible

In a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all the work that happens in a vast pharmaceutical manufacturing plant happens in a device the size of your kitchen refrigerator.

And it's fast. This prototype machine produces 1,000 pills in 24 hours, faster than it can take to produce some batches in a factory. Allan Myerson, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT and a leader of the effort, says it could become eventually an option for anyone who makes medications, which typically require a lengthy and complex process of crystallization.

"We're giving them an alternative to traditional plants and we're reducing the time it takes to manufacturer a drug," he said.

The Defense Department is funding this project because the devices could go to field hospitals for troops, hard-to-reach areas to help combat a disease outbreak, or be dropped at strategic spots across the U.S.

"If there was an emergency you could have these little plants located all over. You just turn them on and you start turning out different pharmaceuticals that are needed," Myerson said.

Sounds simple? It's not. This mini drug plant represents a sea change in how medications have been made for a long time.

"For roughly two centuries, to be honest," says Tim Jamison, a professor of chemistry at MIT and one of Myerson's partners, along with Klavs Jensen, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT. "The way that we tend to do chemistry is in flasks and beakers and that sort of thing, and we call that batch chemistry -- one batch at a time," he says.