Drug pipeline drying up

[Carl Remick]

[The following is from today's NY Times.  The Wall Street Journal featured 
pretty much the same article yesterday, and I find the media's sudden 
fixation on this topic suspicious.  Reason #1:  Healthcare inflation is back 
in a *major* way in the U.S.  Reason #2:  It's beginning to dawn on 
Americans that the pharmaceutical companies' spendthrift, direct-to-consumer 
advertising of drugs contributes significantly to healthcare costs.  With 
those factors in mind, I think the pharmas are trying to head off any 
renewed threat of price controls by singing the blues about their high cost 
of R&D and planting stories like this.]

April 19, 2002

Despite Billions for Discoveries, Pipeline of Drugs Is Far From Full

By ANDREW POLLACK

This should be the golden age for pharmaceutical scientists. The deciphering 
of the human genome is laying bare the blueprint of human life. Medical 
research has increased understanding of disease. Robots and computers are 
turning drug discovery from a mixing of chemicals in a test tube to an 
industrialized, automated process.

Yet if industrialization normally means higher speed and lower costs, the 
pharmaceutical industry has been experiencing the opposite — a "clear fall 
in productivity," according to Dr. Frank L. Douglas, the chief scientific 
officer of Aventis. Instead of narrowing the list of compounds that might be 
useful in drugs, automation has broadened it — greatly increasing the number 
of formulas tested without yet delivering commensurate growth in safe and 
effective drugs. The industry's output of new drugs has risen only modestly 
in the last two decades despite a more than sixfold increase, after 
adjusting for inflation, in research and development spending, to more than 
$30 billion annually. In the last few years, the output has actually 
declined.

[Full text:  
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/19/business/19DRUG.html?pagewanted=print]

Carl

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