The pharmaceutical sector warns that Europe is losing competitiveness compared to the US and Asia

2023-09-09 15:37:08

Saturday, September 9, 2023, 3:37 p.m.

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At the beginning of the 1990s, 41% of new medicines originated in Europe, while in the period 2017-2021 it was only 21%. The reason? Europe has lagged behind in investment in pharmaceutical R&D. While in the United States it has multiplied almost 11 between 1990 and 2020 and now represents more than half of the total investment, in Europe it has only multiplied by five and has come to represent less than a third of investment in R+ D when previously that allocated to pharmaceutical research reached 48.8%. Without forgetting China, which is accelerating and already accounts for 8% of total investment. The general director of the European Federation of the Pharmaceutical Industry (Efpia), Nathalie Moll, explained that to recover lost competitiveness it is necessary to promote “a new European pharmaceutical legislation that protects industrial property and promotes innovation.” At the XXII Meeting of the Spanish Pharmaceutical Industry, Moll criticized several elements of the European Commission proposal such as the reduction from 8 to 6 years of the basic period of regulatory data protection and the reduction of the commercial exclusivity of orphan drugs from 10 to 9 years.

For her part, Lidia Martín, general director of Almirall in Spain and Portugal, highlighted that the pharmaceutical sector is a high-risk sector that needs measures to provide stability, and the current reform proposed by the EC does not achieve this. «Developing a drug is a very high-risk investment, around 2,000 million euros on average. “We need European legislation to give us predictability, because attracting investment will depend on this factor,” she said. Representatives of Daiichi Sankyo, Roche Farma and Amgen also insisted that the decrease in incentives for R&D included in the current review endangers global investments in the sector ending up in our country.

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