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Driven by revolutionary biotechnological advances, healthcare stands poised for an unprecedented leap forward. Health outcomes for millions of people should improve as personalised medicine enables tailored approaches to prevention and care. Yet the current worldwide political and economic environment threatens to diminish the capacity of the biopharmaceutical industry to deliver on this potential benefit (see Figure 1). Unrelenting worldwide political and economic pressure to control the rising cost of healthcare delivery conflicts with the enormous investment of capital (and time) required for research and development (R&D). The cost to bring a single new biologic drug to market easily exceeds $1 billion.
Drug manufacturers are quickly losing blockbuster revenue as more patents expire. Rather than exclusively developing new products on their own, large biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies are stepping up acquisitions and licensing to strengthen their portfolios.
These companies, no longer able to ‘go it alone’, are reaching out not only to fill their pipelines, but also to form alliances within and outside the healthcare realm to provide services to support the use of their products. A compelling reason for this expansion ‘beyond the pill’ is the growing power of government and private payers to determine the value of pharmaceutical products. Payers are no longer willing to reimburse drug companies for medications that do not deliver results – and those results must come at a reasonable cost. The pharmaceutical industry’s old tactic of developing ‘me too’ drugs that only offer marginal improvement to replace products whose patents are expiring no longer works. |
