ABPI worried by public ignorance about medicines
pharmafile | August 31, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing | ABPI, UK
People in the UK are misinformed about how much medicines cost to discover, develop and launch, according to a new ABPI survey.
The organisation describes its findings – which include misconceptions about the size of the NHS’s drugs budget and how much pharma firms spend on R&D – as worrying.
“I am really concerned that people do not understand the cost or value of medicines in this country,” said ABPI chief executive Stephen Whitehead.
“To create new treatments in the UK, the pharmaceutical industry undertakes huge risk and investment and is still able to provide the NHS with amongst the lowest-priced medicines in Europe,” he added.
More than a third of survey respondents thought the NHS spends 20% or more of its budget on medicines – in fact, the figure last year was just 9.7%, down from 12.5% in 1999.
In a similar misunderstanding, most people said that it costs pharma companies under £10 million in R&D to get a medicine to market: but in fact it is an average of £1 billion and 12 years to bring a molecule from the laboratory to the dispensary.
The way pharma is perceived can have repercussions from the nebulous – such as esteem and goodwill – to the more concrete – for example, the framing of legislation.
Recent issues such as GlaxoSmithKline’s $3 billion fraud charge have not helped the image of an industry whose reputation is tarnished in many eyes.
But Whitehead believes the misconceptions highlighted by the survey are also potentially damaging, and the ABPI has pledged to create better public understanding of the benefits, relatively low prices and high costs of developing drugs in the next few months.
“These medicines are the bedrock of the NHS, and have saved and changed the lives of millions of people,” Whitehead concluded, citing the fact that conditions such as HIV, diabetes and heart disease are now manageable due to investment by pharma companies.
Adam Hill
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