To Reduce Drug Prices, Solve R&D Crisis
A new NCPA study concludes that Congress must act to reduce the regulatory burden on pharmaceutical research and development.
Reducing the prices of specialty drugs requires improving the productivity of research and development (R&D). On that front, the news is sobering. Last December, Deloitte and Thomson Reuters examined newly introduced drugs from the 12 pharmaceutical companies with the largest R&D budgets.5 They found it cost $1.3 billion to bring one of these new compounds to market. However, the peak sales forecast for each of these drugs declined by 43 percent, dropping from an average of $816 million in 2010 to $466 million in 2013.
The high nominal prices of new drugs do not compensate for the smaller patient populations they target. Deloitte and Thompson Reuters estimate the internal rate of return (IRR) of R&D spending has dropped in half since 2010, from 10.5 percent to 4.8 percent. Sales of new drugs are not overcoming the loss of patents, weak pricing power for older drugs, or the reduced productivity of R&D.
