Novartis CEO: Straight talk on industry woes
Mr Vasella in the interview talks about the FDA and the pharma industry. Here are some excerpts;
Q. Is the pharmaceutical industry part of the cure or part of the problem?
A. If you look at the mortality rates from hypertensive heart disease or stroke or gastrointestinal bleeding or cancer, in the past 40 years, these diseases have declined as the cause of mortality by 60 to 70 percent. Medicine has made huge progress and to a large part it’s due to better pharmaceuticals. Having said that, the prices have increased significantly. People are starting to ask, “Is it too expensive?” There are, of course, internal costs which one has to take into account. We have invested 17 percent more, year after year, in the past six years for research and development. Externally, clinical studies have become longer and more difficult. And regulatory authorities, especially the F.D.A., have become extremely risk-averse, increasing the risks of research dramatically. That is all contributing to the cost of pharmaceuticals.
Q. When Americans aren’t complaining about the price of drugs, they worry that the pipeline for new drug discovery has dried up. Is that right?
A. I don’t think it’s accurate to say we have a drying up of the pipeline. The problem is that productivity has gone down significantly. If you look at the pipelines of companies and add up the number of products in development, it is quite high. The problem is that it takes longer and is much more costly; dollars spent per compound have increased dramatically. But the potential has not declined. With the unraveling of the human genome, within 10 or 15 years, we will see new products thanks to the new insights. There is a gestation period from the time we have science and logic until we have a drug. Unfortunately, the F.D.A. has become extremely risk-averse.
Some pretty straight forward talk but what this BLOG author would have like to seen is a response to that age old questio "can pharma serve both Wall Street and patients?". With potential blockbusters far and few between and development costs increasing pharma has to make a choice: market drugs with the greatest ROI or one that provides a better quality of health with smaller returns of investment dollars.