RPS: ‘Give pharma incentives’
pharmafile | May 8, 2014 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | NHS, RPS, rare diseases, royal pharmaceutical society
Incentives are urgently required to speed up the development of personalised medicines, according to a new report from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
‘New Medicines, Better Medicines, Better Use of Medicines’ warns that a pharma business model based on producing blockbusters will not work for many new treatments, and that fresh thinking is needed.
It is a conclusion which pharma has, for the most part, already arrived at – but to have an influential group such as the RPS making this call is a significant step.
“The market is not set up to incentivise the production of new types of medicines,” says RPS chief scientist Professor Jayne Lawrence.
“We need the NHS to be able to cope with funding treatments which have a high initial cost but may not require a lifetime of use by patients,” she explains. “Unless we find a way to develop treatments that cure illnesses in months, rather than treat symptoms for years, we will not see the breakthroughs that both scientists and patients want.”
The current crisis in antimicrobial resistance is in part due to the lack of new classes of antibiotics coming on the market, she adds. “Antibiotics can cure infections in weeks, so the volume of sales of drugs is low,” Lawrence goes on. “This doesn’t allow the tens or even hundreds of millions required for research and development to be recouped.”
The same may be true of using stem cells and regenerative drugs to treat patients after a stroke, heart attack or spinal cord injury, says Kevin Shakesheff, professor of advanced drug delivery and tissue engineering at the University of Nottingham.
“These treatments will transform medicine but we face major hurdles getting them into widespread clinical use,” he explains. “They present new problems in manufacturing, safety and economics and require new ways of working across disciplines in order to accelerate commercial and clinical success.”
Richard Bergström, director general of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, says there was concern among pharma companies that regulatory requirements and the way forward for developing new drugs are still not clear.
“We need the regulators to move with the science and update their guidelines as our understanding of disease changes,” he says. “We have a duty to deliver the new science to patients as quickly as possible. Both regulators and organisations that pay for drugs need to come together and jointly consider what evidence should be developed.”
Adam Hill
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