ABSTRACT
According to drug manufacturers, the pharmaceutical industry is suffering from an ‘innovation crisis’. Nowadays, the development of new products requires significantly more investment than in the past. Most of the simple but useful chemical entities seem to have been discovered already. Moreover, many top-selling drugs lose their patent protection (‘patent cliff’) and, subsequently, prices and sales of the original drug are undermined by competing generics. Producers try to compensate for the loss of sales by launches of new molecular entities (Jimenez, 2012). However, the new compounds generate fewer sales. As market observers calculated, new products launched in the period from 2001 to 2005 achieved annual average sales of USD 208 million after three years. New products of the period from 2006 to 2010 reached only USD 143 million (Rockoff and Winslow, 2013). Development of a drug which yields more than a billion USD per year (‘blockbuster’) succeeds less often. Drugs combined with biomarker-based diagnostic tests, stratifying patients into groups characterised by different drug reactions, appear to be one way out of trouble, because a new generation of patented products seems attainable (Scollen and Phelan, 2014).
