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New Data Show Most Pharma Projects More Diverse Than Alike -- Which May Not Be Good For Patients

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It is not unusual to hear critics of the biopharmaceutical industry assert that these companies aren’t innovative. Rather, they spend the bulk of their R&D resources chasing the same products, particularly compounds which are proven to be of value, in the hopes of cashing in on the market already established by the first drug approved in the field. As a result, critics will claim that most new drugs are “me-too” drugs and add little value to healthcare.

However, data has been published that indicate the pharma industry’s portfolio is more diverse than it is being credited for. In their article “Novelty in the target landscape of the pharmaceutical industry” , authors Agarwal, Sanseau and Cardon set out to analyze the overlap in R&D projects in current industry pipelines. Using the “Pharmaprojects “ database from Citeline, they selected all human targets that are associated with an active preclinical or clinical program for each organization. By their own admission, this is a relatively crude analysis that relies entirely on the quality of the Pharmaprojects database. While not digitally precise, I would think that such an analysis has merit in terms of gaining a sense of industry trends.

The authors broke the projects down into two categories:

1)      “proven” – targets where there is already a  drug approved;

2)      “novel” – targets for which no drug has made it through the regulatory process.

In the proven category, they identified 247 targets, 64% of which are being pursued by four or more companies. This certainly fuels the arguments that biopharmaceutical companies are too focused on incrementalism in that there are multiple companies chasing targets for which an already approved drug exists. It’s likely that all of these companies believe that they can improve upon the prototype, but to be frank, this is a risky strategy. For such a “second generation” compound to be successful, it would have to offer a significant improvement over the marketed, established drug for payers, physicians and patients to accept it. That’s not easy to do.

More surprising, however, are the data for the novel targets. There are 712 projects in this category. As one might expect, many of these targets attract a great deal of attention and 26% of them are being pursued by three or more companies.  However, more than HALF of these targets are only being worked on by a SINGLE company. This certainly goes against common perceptions. There could be a number of explanations for this. Perhaps these single company programs are extremely speculative and of very high risk, thus causing organizations to shy away from them. These could also be programs that target very small patient populations and so are less attractive to many companies. Regardless of the reasons, the broad biopharmaceutical portfolio may have more diversity that it is being credited for.

One might think that this is great news for it suggests that the biopharma industry is spreading out its resources and, by working on more diverse programs, more breakthrough medicines will be available for those in need.  However, I am a bit skeptical. As is well documented, there is a high attrition rate in drug R&D with, at best, one in ten projects resulting in success. If I were a patient with a particular disease, while encouraged by having a company devote efforts to help find a treatment for me, I’d be more encouraged if three or four companies were working hard on the project. In this way, there would be a better chance for a drug to emerge from all this work.

This, however, might be challenged by some. What if, per chance, two or three drugs emerge all against the same target? Wouldn’t all of this been wasteful? Not really. For one thing, no two drugs are exactly alike.  Patients react differently to drugs - a drug that is safe and effective in one person might cause migraines in someone else. Also, multiple drugs in a class generate price competition. Both patients and payers benefit from that.

Thus, if Pfizer , Merck and GSK are all pursuing a novel drug for the same disease, don’t think of it as wasteful. More likely, this means that researchers in three different organizations are all working hard to find a medicine that might help you or a loved one deal with a difficult disease. And with three different teams attacking the problem, the chances of success are much higher.