Intellectual Thoughts by Sanjay Panda: July 2011


Drug R&D spending fell in 2010, and heading lower

The global drug industry cut its research spending for the first time ever in 2010 and the pace of decline looks set to quicken this year. Expenditure on discovering and developing new medicines  estimated to be  $68 billion  in 2010, down nearly 3 percent on the $70 billion spent in both 2008 and 2009, according to Thomson Reuters. 

Since 2000,  investment by drug companies   for NCE  is almost  80 percent of the industry's total R&D  spend  which has increased by more 50 percent ,  but output of  NCE has actually gone down. Last year ,  21  NCE were launched on the global market against 26 in 2009.
 Between 2008 and 2010 there were 55 terminations of projects that had already reached the final Phase III stage of clinical testing, more than double the level of 2005-07, reflecting the growing difficulty of developing new drugs that are better than existing ones.