Chances and Risks of Pharmaceutical Development

The average effective patent protection for human and animal health products approved in the USA between 1984 and 1989 was only 10 

Despite the sharp increase in development cost, the number of new products launched and their sales expectations remained fairly constant (Lumley and Walker, 1992). It has been calculated that in the UK even the best selling 10% new drugs require longer than the effective life-span of their patents to recover the research and development cost the majority of new pharmaceuticals cannot recoup these cost even after more than 20 years (Prentis et al., 1988). 

Comparable figures with reasonable validity for animal health products are not available. Veterinary product development cost are definitely lower, but the revenues are also much lower. Due to rising registration demands, influenced by both the pharmaceutical and the agricultural sector, veterinary product development cost follow the same trend as human health products. 

Relatively few really new and attractive products have been introduced in the animal health market. The recently developed new and expensive human therapeutics do not play a major role in animal health. Prophylactic vaccines against the major endemic diseases are already available and are difficult to improve for a competitive price. Several other interesting vaccine candidates are stuck in the research phase due to unsurpassable difficulties to achieve sufficient efficacy. 

The continuing high interest and investment in pharmaceutical research cannot be attributed to guaranteed high revenues. Return on assets as a commonly used measure of industrial profitability for the 

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