EFPIA Director General’s lecture: Is society ready for the new science?
14.12.11
Last week, Richard Bergström, EFPIA Director-General gave a lecture in Brussels entitled “Is society ready for the new science?”
The lecture attracted an excellent turnout, with more than 120 participants including , EC officials, industry, media, university representatives, industry representatives and third-party stakeholders.
Addressing delegates, Richard Bergström, raised some of the following key issues: the financial crisis, the patent cliff the industry is facing, finding new incentives for innovation, simplifying the system of clinical trials and speeding the access medicines to patients.
The Financial crisis: “An opportunity for growth”
“We have associations like EFPIA, not just to deal with crises, but also to plan for the future, look around the corner and make sure industry continues to do what we are supposed to do. In fact the crisis also presents opportunities to concentrate on growth, on competitiveness and what is really important in life, such as our health. “
Patents’ expiration: “We have patents to stimulate development”
“We also face the fact that we have patents and when they expire we are not going to make any more money. We have patents to stimulate development and once they go off we should try and use low prices of generics as quickly as possible and as many as possible, as long as you reach the target for the patients. On that we don’t say enough from my industry, but we fully embrace that policy. The consequence the patent expiring, is a patent cliff and loss of billions from one day to another.”
Antibiotics: Creating a new incentives for innovation through public-private partnerships
“The pipeline is almost empty and that has led us to launch, together with the European Commission just a few weeks ago, a new public private partnership, where we will collaborate in a way you have never seen before. Companies would pool everything they have and would have co-funding of clinical trials and so on. There would probably be more areas where there is not enough research going on because the private sector has left it.”
The Innovative Medicines Initiative
“The Innovative Medicines Initiative. It is a €2 billion pot between the European Commission and EFPIA members. We are only halfway through this. Now we are starting to see the huge prospects.
Antibiotics have been put in it.
In IMI there is project called “New meds” where a company has combined all their information on some psychiatric disorders – outside of Europe also there is an Alzheimer’s collaboration that the companies pool all this data that has failed in clinical trials – they have pooled it all to learn from one another.
There is an initiative on Alzheimer diagnostic standardisation. This means that there will be a new role for these research collaborations; the IMI will have an additional role – it is not just going to be to speed up and sort out bottlenecks and pool to deliver, but it is also about setting the standards, it is bringing in the regulators, and healthcare practitioners; how do we prepare for implementing this? This is all about what we call regulatory science. “
Pharma sector is facing the “Better than the Beatles” problem
“Once in a while some artist or someone comes along and sets the standard. It is very difficult to beat. We have some of these main stay products – there is Tamoxifen in cancer, Metformin in diabetes – these drugs when they came they weren’t very big. They started like the Beatles, somewhere down in Brighton and then after a while they take off and then they become standard treatments and they don’t cost anything and everyone takes them for granted. If you want to beat that, that is pretty tough. Particularly if you want to do price comparisons against that. Always being compared against the Beatles; this is what is happening to us; even if there are all these people that are not treated effectively with the current medicine. That is one cross-cutting dilemma is that we have lots of good things, but we must move beyond those.”
A successful industry
“Despite the lower numbers of new products every year coming to the market, the quality of those that are coming are still very high. I challenge those that say we have a crisis in innovation; our crisis is that we pay too much per molecule; that is what the investors say. Divide €100 billion in research spend with the number of molecules and you will figure out it is too expensive per capita. That is another problem; there is no crisis either in discovery or in development objectively.”
Richard Bergström concluded:“We aim to be, as we have been, factual science based; very concrete – we think long-term.
We want to come back with concrete proposals in the near future on incentives, on legislation, on regulatory science. One market access; the HTA systems need to be fit for purpose as well, industry needs to be very vocal o, what this new science can deliver. If we do not change these things, these scientific findings will not reach patients. Then we will all have failed in our mission.”
The full speech can be seen below:
