Gone are the days of blockbuster drugs and miraculous cures for intractable diseases. For years, the pharmaceutical industry has been struggling to develop new compounds to battle the diseases that plague humankind. But Big Pharma’s “innovation crisis” is a myth, and the real problem with the industry lies in incentives to spend millions of dollars on making drugs that are only slightly better than existing products, according to a new analysis published in BMJ.
Donald Light, a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and Joel Lexchin, who teaches and studies public health policy at Canada’s York University, write that the oft-touted phenomenon of slowed innovation and stagnant drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry is an untruth sown by pharma execs among members of the media and lawmakers in a bid to attract more R&D funding.
