Nine European drugmakers: ‘Medicines are national security assets’ … warning of crisis

The board chairs of nine major European drugmakers issued a joint letter warning of a crisis in Europe’s pharmaceutical industry and urging that medicines be treated as national security assets.

On the 22nd (local time), the board chairs of AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Chiesi Group, Ipsen, GSK, Novo Nordisk, Novartis, Roche and Sanofi said this in an open letter published in each company’s newsroom, the Korea Biotechnology Industry Organization’s Bioeconomy Research Center reported on the 23rd.

“As with defense and energy, modern medicines should also be considered essential national infrastructure and should not depend on other countries,” they said. “If we do not act boldly, our future will be built elsewhere.”

According to the letter, Europe led vaccine supply and the development of treatments for heart disease and cancer, recording a European Union (EU) trade surplus of more than 220 billion euros, but that legacy is now at risk.

In the past 2 years, announced pharmaceutical investments in the United States and China alone have exceeded $600 billion. Europe’s share of global pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) has fallen from 43% in 1990 to 31% today, while its share of commercial clinical trials has dropped by half over the past 10 years, to 9%.

China has already overtaken Europe in clinical trials, pharmaceutical patents and new drug development, the letter said.

The impact on patients is also clear. About 40% of newly approved treatments are not available to European patients, and even when they are, patients must wait nearly 600 days for treatment.

They said this was the result of Europe treating medicines for decades as costs to be contained. They added that it takes more than 10 years and an investment of about 3 billion euros for a single innovative medicine to reach patients, and only one or two of 10,000 candidate compounds become actual new drugs.

The letter proposed that the EU could drive change by accelerating clinical trials, protecting intellectual property rights and adopting reasonable digital policies. It said that if national governments address the lack of investment in innovative medicines and modernize value assessment systems, the clinical trials sector alone could generate 53 billion euros in economic value and create 82,000 jobs.