Technavio’s healthcare and life sciences report library contains a few hundred reports on a huge spectrum of drug and diagnostic markets.
And in this long list of research, you would be hard-pressed to find a single market worth less than a few billion dollars.
The bacterial conjunctivitis market will hit $1.49 billion, rheumatoid arthritis drugs will top $31 billion, and the oncology biosimilar market will see more than $5 billion in growth to hit a total value of $6.87 billion—all by 2020.
Such fast growth in pharmaceuticals is a complex and multifaceted issue.
The technologies that are central to drug discovery have gotten many times cheaper over the past 60 years. But while the technology is less expensive, it costs almost 100 times more to create a drug today than it did in 1950.
More and more money is being poured into research and development, and in turn, companies are selling their drugs with larger price tags.
And researchers from the University of Oxford think that, despite tech advances, the cost of drug discovery and development is approaching an unsustainable level.
“Huge scientific and technological gains should have increased the quality of academic science and raised industrial R&D efficiency. However, academia faces a “reproducibility crisis”; inflation-adjusted industrial R&D costs per novel drug increased nearly 100 fold between 1950 and 2010; and drugs are more likely to fail in clinical development today than in the 1970s,” write Jack Scannell, from Oxford University’s Centre for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation, and consultant Jim Bosley in a report published recently in PLOS ONE.
You can find the paper, entitled “When Quality Beats Quantity: Decision Theory, Drug Discovery, and the Reproducibility Crisis”, here.
Scannell and Bosley suggest, among other things, that a shift towards processes that are easily industrialized in order to optimize throughput, as well as changing “scientific fashions” are major contributors to the disparity between innovation and results.
They also lament a decline in predictive methods. In scientific research, prediction is much more tangible than it sounds. It is often quantitative and used to forecast what happens under specific conditions. But many drugs developed over the past 60-some years using predictive methods have been for diseases that are easy to treat, and modern pharmaceutical companies are now tackling drug development for much bigger beasts.
“This leaves scientists working on as-yet-untreated diseases using less predictive discovery methods (e.g., Alzheimer’s),” says a press release from the University of Oxford.
The same release quotes Scannell, saying, “Governments, companies, and charities should focus on identifying and funding predictive methods, even if they don’t match current scientific fashion.”
He pinpoints these methods as one key to explaining the skyrocketing costs of drug development.
