The Endless Frontier? The Recent Upsurge of R&D Productivity in Pharmaceuticals

Abstract

Analyses of pharmaceutical pipelines of drug development in the 1990-2010 documented progressively increasing attrition rates and duration of clinical trials, leading to a diffuse perception of a \"productivity crisis\". We produced a new set of analyses for the last decade, using an extensive data of more than 45,000 projects between 1990 and 2017, and report a recent upsurge of R&D productivity within the industry. First, we investigated how R&D projects are allocated across therapeutic areas and found a polarization towards high-risk/high-reward indications, with a strong focus on oncology. Importantly, attrition rates have been decreasing at all clinical stages in recent years. In parallel, we observed an increase of early failures in preclinical research, and a significant reduction of time required to identify projects to be discontinued. Notably, more recent projects are increasingly based on novel mechanisms of action and target indications with small patient populations. Finally, by analyses of the relative contribution of different institutional types and development companies, we show that the observed increased performance in clinical trials is mostly due to the contribution of biotech-nological companies, while pharmaceutical companies have significantly improved their performances in identifying false positives in preclinical research.