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A decade of change

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 11, pages 17–18 (2012)Cite this article

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While total market cap has fallen, the annual sales of the top ten drugs have almost doubled over the decade (Table 2). The number of biologics in the top ten has risen — a trend that is predicted to continue, such that in 4 years time the top ten list is expected to be dominated by biologics2. The number of blockbuster drugs launched each year has remained relatively constant — at about 6.5 per annum — but their average value has fallen.

Table 2 Top ten drugs by sales: 2001 versus 2010
Full size table

To mitigate some of the risk and to manage R&D costs, there was also a significant increase in externalization of the sourcing of R&D assets and risk-sharing through partnering over the past decade (Fig. 3). R&D spending, nevertheless, generally trended upwards — although there were large company-to-company variations in these data (Fig. 4).

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Figure 1: Indexed number of active substances entering each phase of development from 2001 to 2009.
Figure 2: Probability of success to market from key milestones.
Figure 3: Changes in the percentage of lead projects in each development phase between 2001 and 2010 by asset origin.
Figure 4: R&D budgets in 2010 for top spenders.
Figure 5: Changes in therapeutic area focus from 2001 to 2010, for new drugs in all stages from Phase I trials to submission.

References

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  1. John Arrowsmith is a scientific director at Thomson Reuters, 77 Hatton Garden, London EC1N 8JS, UK. john.arrowsmith@thomsonreuters.com,

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Arrowsmith, J. A decade of change. Nat Rev Drug Discov 11, 17–18 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd3630

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