Biotech Products Are Filling The Pharma Pipelines: Study

Over the past decade, the pharmaceutical industry has shifted emphasis from small molecule compounds to biotech products for a few good reasons. For one, much of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked when it comes to developing blockbuster pills for some widespread afflictions. Moreover, biotech medicines can generally command much higher price tags. The results of this shift can be seen in a new analysis. Biotech products, which accounted for 7 percent of revenue generated by the 10 top selling pharmaceutical and biotech products worldwide in 2001, accounted for 71 percent of the 10 best-selling products last year. And biotech product sales as a share of total pharmaceutical sales more than doubled to 17 percent last year from 8 percent in 2002. Overall, worldwide growth in biotech sales rose 353 percent – from $36 billion in 2001 to $163 billion in 2012. “The notion that large pharmaceutical companies primarily develop small molecule drugs no longer holds,” says Ken Kaitin, who heads the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, which analyzed R&D, pipeline, and sales data for three specific years: 2002, 2007, and 2012. A key reason for the change is that patents expired on many small molecule drugs at the same time that new technologies emerged. The number of biotech products in clinical trials grew 155 percent in 11 years, from 355 in 2001 to 907 in 2012, with big drugmakers last year involved in about 40 percent of all biotech products in clinical...
Source: Pharmalot - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs