Is there a crisis in the drug development pipeline?
At this past weekend’s Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) conference in Philadelphia, Ed Silverman from Pharmalot moderated a panel on “efforts to revive the drug delivery pipeline.” He drew the attention of the audience to FDA data, published earlier this year, on the number of applications/approvals for new molecular entities (NME).
Source: redrawn from FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) presentation. The data in my opinion is a little ambiguous as to the true state of the Pharma industry. While the number of applications declined last year to a five year low of 23, from a previous 5 year high in 2009 of 37, the number of NME approvals at 21 was only just below the 5 year average of 22.