Medicines Access and Innovation
Time to act together
Nathalie Moll, EFPIA Director General.
The time for action is now to align Europe’s policies to the twin goals of medicines access and innovation, writes Nathalie Moll, Director General, The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, who believes that the Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe has adopted the wrong approach to addressing access and affordability.
the shared goals of access and innovation, ensuring the right policy instrument is used to address the right question and learn the lessons of the pandemic?
In November 2020, Pfizer announced the first interim analysis of its Covid-19 vaccine, developed with German biotechnology firm, BioNTech. The statement had an almost instantaneous economic impact. The FTSE100 in London rose by 4%, the Dow Jones in the US was up 5.6%, closing at up 3% by the end of the day. There followed announcements of progress from a number of other companies such as Moderna and AstraZeneca. This dramatic sequence of events underlined the inextricable link between our health and our economic prosperity. Covid-19 is a microcosm of the pivotal role played by new diagnostics, treatments and vaccines in not only saving and improving the quality of our lives, but also facilitating economic stability and then growth. It is why EU President von der Leyen was right to set out, in her mission letter to Commissioner Kyriakides, the dual goals
To re-establish Europe as a world leader in medical innovation, the EU’s industrial strategy must preserve and foster Europe’s world class IP framework and the EU trade strategy should link-in by ensuring strong IP in EU bilateral trade agreements. This will increase strategic resilience of the EU economy. Put simply, investors go where they know they can get a predictable return on their investment. Many of the priority medicines being tested for Covid-19 exist today thanks to the current EU research eco-system that includes stable and predictable intellectual property (IP) rules and other incentives that drove their creation and development and attracted investors. The recently published Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe recognises the critical importance of incentives in driving research into areas of unmet medical need. Learning the
Irish PharmaChem | Industry Buyers Guide 2021
of ensuring access to medicines and supporting the European pharmaceutical industry to be a world leader in medical innovation. It is why the EU pharmaceutical strategy, IP Action Plan and industrial strategy are so important. Europe has issues to address; the region has an innovation problem and there are significant disparities and delays in access to new treatments. A recent report by IQVIA highlighted that some patients can wait up to six times as long for access to new medicines than their counterparts in a neighbouring European country, and Europe has witnessed a steady haemorrhaging of cuttingedge medical innovation to the US and China. Just 25 years ago, Europe was the world leader in Research and Development; today, it is not and risks dependency on other regions for medical advances. The big question is how can Europe achieve
Re-establishing Europe as an innovator
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