Baby Boomer Opportunities In The Pharmaceutical Industry

Over the decades, the pharmaceutical industry has experienced a slow and steady growth driven by large pharmaceutical companies that capture a large market share. These industries are however facing many challenges like lack of innovation, patent expiration, generics and its competitions and poor product pipelines and difficulties in bringing new drugs to the market quickly and effectively. The so called block-buster drugs bring in most of revenues for the big pharma companies. A drug is called a block-buster if it generates $ 1 Billion in annual revenue for the company that generates it. The emergence of patent cliff incurred heavy losses to the company due to patent expirations and the generic companies within no time make a newer version

Globalization and shifting research with emergence of new super powers like India and China offering preclinical and clinical services at lower costs, industry started exploring new avenues to optimize R and D costs.

Socioeconomic factors: As the health care costs are increasing globally, there is increasing challenge with industry to address the issues.

Aging population -Baby boomers: This is a new opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry. Baby boomers will need more medical care, including medication. These pharmaceutical industries have a scope to help these baby boomers to continue active lives into old age.

Low productivity: Rising R and D costs and low productivity is making the industry to analyze the reasons and modify the course.

The three major reasons for such a low attrition rate are:

1) Clinical failures: 90% of the drugs from early discovery stage fail by the time they evolve into post-development stage. According to the center for Medicine Research (CMR) from a group of 16 companies, Phase II success rates fell from 28% (in 2006-2007) to 18 % (in 2008-2009). The reasons for failure are due to the standards unmet for the safety, efficacy and DMPK (Drug metabolism and Pharmako-kinetic)

Many project are looking for short term goals pushing the NCE (New Chemical Entities) which are not optimal. Some companies due to pressure of survival and timelines push the NCE into market. In view of the new Mergers and Acquisition, many companies focus more on decreasing the costs than improving R and D productivity, which benefits them in the long run.

3) Drug Launch failures: The drug launch is the most critical event in the products life cycle. This has become more complex due to continuous changes in health care policies and regulatory environment, increased competition from the biotech industry and the startups. Between 2003-2009, about 210 molecule entities were launched, of which two-thirds failed to meet the expectations of pre-launch sales in the market in the first year.

Methods to improve R and D productivity: To increase productivity while decreasing the costs many strategies were implemented, like increased preclinical efficiency, more on quality rather than quantity, and collaboration between public and private organizations like government organizations, pharmaceutical industry and Academic