ABSTRACT
The United States has been seen as losing its power and authority, generally and pharmaceutically. A few European countries, notably Switzerland and the United Kingdom, have a good long-term track record for developing novel products and they are very likely to continue to do so. In recent years some commentators on the pharmaceutical industry have seen developing countries as the future and have suggested that power is passing from the developed world. Nevertheless the US was far and away the biggest pharmaceutical market in 2011, with sales of $322 billion, nearly three times the size of the second-ranked country, Japan. On progress in cancer specifically, a 2012 report from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development found that between 2000 and 2011, 40 new anticancer drugs were approved in the US but only 30 in Europe. The US trend has also been much more positive than for Japan.
