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Facing such a furious rate of innovation, and so much medical data being collected outside formal clinical trials, is the regulatory system capable of keeping pace? Will the future of medicine be ungoverned?

Big Pharma

Big Pharma is clearly at a crossroads

For two decades, healthcare has relied on Big Pharma to crank out wonder drugs to control our disease symptoms and risk factors. But progress has slowed—in some cases stalled.

» 7 of the 13 historic pharmaceutical companies had no new molecular entities (NMEs) approved in 2016.

» Even as the cost of developing a drug is rising, the odds of getting a drug from Phase 1 all the way to FDA approval have fallen below 10%.

» Those odds in oncology are only 5.1%, in cardiovascular only 6.6% and in neurology only 8.4%.

» As a result, financial returns across Big Pharma have steadily fallen over the current decade from 11% to 3.7%.

$154 billion is spent every year on drug research. That annual investment is in jeopardy if it doesn’t pay out. Already the R&D investment into antibiotics and vaccines has slowed to a trickle because of the lack of financial return.

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