Market Structure and Drug Innovation

An explosion of knowledge and a growing array of tools and technologies have transformed modern drug R&D, while its cost has risen by a sizable amount. At the same time, the unchecked increase in health care and prescription drug spending has spawned cost containment policies that are restricting the demand for drugs in all major markets. This Perspective explores the interplay between technological advances and regulatory policies and their likely impact on the dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry. Advances in the life sciences have profoundly transformed the drug research and development (R&D) process. That transformation has come at a price, boosting the cost of developing a new molecular entity (NME) to 802 million by 2000. More expensive R&D, combined with an aging population and better diagnostic techniques, has swelled drug spending in the United States, which reached 141 billion in 2001. These increases have in turn induced a spate of cost containment measures that are affecting demand for pharmaceuticals in all major markets. This Perspective considers the impact of the interplay between technological advances and health care policy on the future dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry.Pharmaceutical Industry, R&D Productivity, Health Care Policy

Technological Regimes and the Growth of Networks An Empirical Analysis

This paper shows how specific technological and relational regimes have shaped the growth of the network of R&D collaborative agreements in pharmaceuticals in the 1990s. Our analysis reveals the existence of a complex set of regimes of firm growth within the network, providing additional evidence supporting prediction that both growth and innovative activities of large and small firms respond, even within a given industry, to considerably different technological and economic factors. Moreover, the paper shows, in the context of a specific industry and by means of a series of preliminary and explorative empirical analyses, that information on the topological properties of a given industrial settings and on roles/positions of organizations within it can be used to disentangle some fundamental generative processes underlying observed processes of growth. This result contributes to the 'old' stochastic approach to firm growth, in the direction of building parsimonious and, at the same time, more realistic, representations of processes of industrial growth.-

On Firm Growth in Networks

This paper is explorative in nature. Based on an empirical analysis of two different industrial settings (life sciences, LS; information and communication technologies, ICT), it investigates network growth and firm growth in networks. We find a remarkable correspondence between a few fundamental findings of the ‘old’ stochastic approach to the analysis of firm internal growth, and empirically observed patterns of firm external growth through collaborative agreements. We show that scale-free behavior in real-world industrial networks can be accounted for by a general and parsimonious model, originally developed by Herbert Simon in 1955, based on entry and proportional growth. However, relevant departures from the stochastic benchmark are revealed that cannot be ascribed to the effect of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and growth autocorrelation. Moreover, different regimes of growth are found to be at work in the life sciences for originators versus developers of new business opportunities, reflecting the fact that growth is driven by specialization and division of labor in the processes of generation and attraction/development of technological opportunities.Firm growth; Network growth; Biotechnology; Information and communication technologies

The intensity of competition after patent expiry in pharmaceuticals. A cross-country analysis

This paper shows that the relationships between the dynamics of drug priees, patent expiry, and competition by multisource drugs vary significantly across countries. A clear distinction seems to emerge. On the one side, systems that rely on market based competition (particularly the US) promote a clear distinction between firms that act as innovators and firms that act as imitators after patent expiry. Original products enjoy premium prices under patent protection, and face fierce price competition after patent expiry. On the contrary, systems that rely on administered prices (particularly France and Italy) nurture strategies of pre-emptive brand proliferation and horizontal differentiation by imitative brand name products, well before patent expiry. Our work confirms that that systems that rely on administered prices have tended to stifle price competition, to protect less efficient companies, and to encourage strategies of incremental innovation and imitation

Global Competitiveness in Pharmaceuticals: A European Perspective

The report examines the competitive position of the European pharmaceutical companies and industries, and compares them with the pharmaceutical companies and industries in other parts of the world, particularly the US. Over the last two decades, the industry has experienced some important structural changes, mainly driven by technological and institutional shocks that have affected all the stages of its value chain. In turn, this has led to changes in firms' organisation and in market structure, within domestic markets, regionally, and globally. The main finding of the report is that the European industry has indeed been losing competitiveness as compared to the USA, although there are large differences and trends across European countries. As a whole, Europe is lagging behind in its ability to generate, organise, and sustain innovation processes that are increasingly expensive and organisationally complex. In fact, one conclusion of the report is that the relative position of the US as a locus of innovation in pharmaceuticals has increased over the past decade compared to Europe. All in all, the report claims that the competitiveness of the European pharmaceutical industry is negatively affected by the persistence of insufficient degrees of competition and institutional integration, still centred on domestic and fragmented health care and research systems. Four sets of variables have been found to be relevant as sources of competitiveness and growth in pharmaceuticals: 1) The size and the structure of the biomedical education and research systems; 2) Some basic institutions governing labor markets for skilled researchers and managers, as well as corporate governance and finance; 3) Intellectual property rights and patent law; 4) The institutional settings in the regulation of health care systems and, moreover, the nature and intensity of competition on the final market. The data analysed in this report come from OECD, Eurostat, the European Patent Office, IMS Health and PHID (PHarmaceutical Industry Database) at the University of Siena

Innovation and corporate dynamics: a theoretical framework

We provide a detailed analysis of a generalized proportional growth model (GPGM) of innovation and corporate dynamics that encompasses the Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect and the Simon growth process as particular instances. The predictions of the model are derived in terms of (i) firm size distribution, (ii) the distribution of firm growth rates, and (iii-iv) the relationships between firm size and the mean and variance of firm growth rates. We test the model against data from the worldwide pharmaceutical industry and find its predictions to be in good agreement with empirical evidence on all four dimensions

R&D, Within and Between Patent Competition in the Pharmaceutical Industry

We analyse the consequences of the increasing complexity of R&D on within- and between-patent competition in the pharmaceutical industry. The intensity of competition is measured by jointly considering the timing from market launch to patent expiry, the strength of between-patent competition as well as competition introduced by generic producers. A simple model is proposed that predicts the shrinking of product lifetimes in the presence of correlated parallel R&D projects and market portfolios. The model is tested using data on pharmaceutical products sold in Europe and in the US. Based on our model we are able to estimate the impact of R&D complexity and relatedness among R&D portfolios on the value of innovative drugs

The Sustainability of European Health Care Systems: Beyond Income and Ageing

During the last thirty years health care expenditure (HCE) has been growing much more rapidly than GDP in all OECD countries. Against this background, we look at the determinants of HCE growth in Europe, explicitly taking into account the role of income, ageing population, life habits, technological progress, as well as institutional and budgetary variables. Our results confirm that the current trend of increasing HCE is rooted in a set of differentiated factors. Income levels lead to higher HCE, and the magnitude of the estimated elasticity poses serious concerns about long-term sustainability of current trends. All in all, HCE growth appears to be driven by structural factors that cannot be easily compressed if not through rationing. The key challenge for many European Governments seems to be the design of pluralistic systems, where a well-balanced mix of public and private financing can realize a balance between sustainability and access.health care expenditure; sustainability; ageing population; income elasticity; welfare

Competencies, Technological Change and Network Dynamics. The case of the bio-pharmaceutical industry

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