The R&D Productivity Crisis: Is There a Bright Side?

Lots of interesting responses to our post on the historically bad year for new drug approvals this year.

One top R&D exec at a big pharma company focused on the last line: “Something needs to change.”

“It does and it is. If we can steer clear of major disruptions I am convinced that we can turn this round. A lot of change needs to happen, but directed at improving the process of choosing targets, getting them into man and to proof-of-concept quickly then streamlining a clumsy development engine.”

Another reader in a Big Pharma R&D organization writes somewhat less optimistically:

“I am sure everyone in the industry is thinking of ways to ‘innovate’ out of this situation and I believe the next year or two is going to be interesting for us all.”

And then there is this pragmatic response from the VC side:

“Depressing but very interesting. This shows why venture capitalists should leave it to the pharmas to try to get drugs approved!”

Speaking of depressing, we also received congratulations from a colleague at another publication for managing to work in a Philadelphia sports reference in a post about NME approval statistics. The depressing part is that it has been 25 years since a major Philly sports team won a championship. Yikes.

There is lot’s more to say about the state of R&D productivity. We have taken a deeper dive into the numbers on TheRPMReport.com, and coupled it with some of the observations of top industry executives at The RPM Report's FDA/CMS Summit.

There is one surprise: as bad as the past several years have been by all conventional measures of R&D output, there is a glimmer of hope. The optimistic view, that we are on the brink of an unprecedented flow of innovative new products—just might be right. (You do have to be a subscriber to The RPM Report to read our complete analysis, or sign up for a 30-day trial to get a taste of what you are missing.)

Please Note: our initial count of drug approvals in the IN VIVO Blog was off by one. It turns out there were 17 new molecular entity approvals, not 16—Fresenius Kabi’s hypovolemia agent Voluven (hydroxyethyl starch) was approved December 27.

Voluven was approved under the 505(b)(2) mechanism as equivalent to other blood volume enhancers, so it definitely does not add to our benchmark statistics (innovative commercial therapies, or ICTs). The extra NME also doesn’t change anything else in our analysis: 17 NMEs is still the lowest total since 1983, as is 19 novel molecules (NMEs plus novel biologics).

Voluven is nevertheless an interesting approval: it is the latest example of the emerging follow-on biologics pathway at FDA.

What’s that? You think there is no such pathway? Not so. Congress has yet to enact a legislative pathway for follow-on versions of biologics regulated under the Public Health Service Act. But for biologics that happen to be regulated under the FD&C Act (like human growth hormone, insulin, insulin-like growth factor, etc. etc.) follow-on approvals keep trickling out of the agency. Look for more on that topic as well, coming soon in The RPM Report.