How Much to Develop a Drug? An Update.

I've referenced this Matthew Herper piece on the cost of drug development several times over the last few years. It's the one where he totaled up pharma company R&D expenditures (from their own financial statements) and then just divided that by the number of drugs produced. Crude, but effective - and what it said was that some companies were spending ridiculous, unsustainable amounts of money for what they were getting back. Now he's updated his analysis, looking at a much longer list of companies (98 of them!) over the past ten years. Here's the list, in a separate post. Abbott is at the top, but that's misleading, since they spent R&D money on medical devices and the like, whose approvals don't show up in the denominator. But that's not the case for #2, Sanofi: 6 drugs approved during that time span, at a cost, on their books of ten billion dollars per drug. Then you have (as some of you will have guessed) AstraZeneca - four drugs at 9.5 billion per. Roche, Pfizer, Wyeth, Lilly, Bayer, Novartis and Takeda round out the top ten, and even by that point we're still looking at six billion a whack. One large company that stand out, though, is Bristol-Myers Squibb, coming in at #22, 3.3 billion per drug. The bottom part of the list is mostly smaller companies, often with one approval in the past ten years, and that one done reasonably cheaply. But three others that stand out as having spent significant amounts of money, while getting something back for it, are Genzyme, Shire, ...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Industry History Source Type: blogs