Pharmaceutical industry innovation

Schmid EF, Smith DA. Is declining innovation in the pharmaceutical industry a myth Drug Discovery Today 2005 10 1031-9. 

Although, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, novel IT strategies cannot transform the pharmaceutical industry the discovery, development, and delivery to the patient of innovative new medicines meeting a variety of unmet medical needs is entirely dependent on the successful implementation and integration of powerful, predictive, and pervasive computing. 

NMR microscopy is ultimately an innovative method of research and it is not surprising that most of the commercially installed systems, approximately 80%, are installed in public scientific research centers, where new applications are continuously being developed. The method is not particularly widely distributed in industry, where standardized methods are more often used. However, NMR microscopy is mainly used in the pharmaceutical industry for the development of new drugs, in the food industry for the development of new types of food, in the chemical industry for creating and characterizing new materials and in the polymer industry, e.g., for creating new mixtures for tires. 

While we cannot predict how these policies will play out in the years ahead, they will dramatically influence innovation, positively or negatively, in the future and the pharmaceutical industry that depends on innovation and the consequent supply of new drug products that depends on the pharmaceutical industry. 

This chapter offers an overview of the role played by technical information in the development of innovation and the necessary incentives for its creation, and at the same time the implications for the pharmaceutical sector. To this end, we present the basis and the significance of the patent system, we offer an analysis of the impact of this system, and lasdy we present a reflection on the future of the system and its relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. 

Three submarkets of the pharmaceutical market can be distinguished innovative patented products sold by prescription, products whose patent has expired and are sold by prescription, and products sold without a prescription. The public regulation of prices in the first of these submarkets, and often also in the second, is a fact that can be observed in most Western countries, with certain notable exceptions such as the USA. Concern about the particular characteristics of the pharmaceutical market (for example, the existence of patents and the pharmaceutical industry s rate of return), together with the desire to provide the majority of the population with access to medicines, regardless of their ability to pay (in many countries the public sector is the main buyer in this market), has led to the fairly widespread adoption of more or less strict price intervention and control policies for pharmaceuticals. 

The innovative pharmaceutical industry is one of the clearest exponents of the familiar process of the globalization of the economy. The reasons for this are obvious first, companies need to recover the huge investment in R D that is necessary to get an innovative medicinal product with added therapeutic value onto the market. Second, the cost of transporting pharmaceuticals is usually low in comparison with the economic value of the product, which facilitates the geographical extension of markets. Finally, the company does not even need to transport goods, as it can limit itself to selling technology, especially if the innovation is protected by a system of patents, and this facilitates international expansion even more. 

Ballance, R., J. Pogan and H. Forstner (1992), The World s Pharmaceutical Industries an International Perspective on Innovation, Competition and Policy, Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, US I idward 11 gar. 

The article by Rovira10 stands out for the clarity of its ideas. It sets out an up-to-date description of the pharmaceutical industry and the Spanish market before and after the single market, and its chief merit is its suggestions for a common strategy for the EU. The diagnosis focuses on three points the need for different policies for innovative and non-innovative products, the importance of expected benefits as an incentive for innovation and the existence of conflicts of objectives at national level and between national and EU interests, the solution of which requires compromises of different sorts. 

M. Santoro s doctoral thesis29 compares Argentina s pharmaceutical industry with Spain s, primarily to gain insight into the technological direction followed by companies and their production of innovations, and also the effect of the public R D promotion plans that have been applied in Spain,... 

DiMasi JA et al. Cost of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. J Health Econ 1991 10 107-142. 

To ensure the regulatory work does not impede innovations in the pharmaceutical industry... 

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