Simona Gamba, Laura Magazzini, Paolo Pertile (2023)
Improving access to medicines and promoting pharmaceutical innovation. Available at europarl.europa.eu
Health is a fundamental human right, and achieving equal access to medicines is crucial to ensuring public health. The current system of pharmaceutical innovation reliesstrongly on the private sector, and remuneration of innovation is mainly based on exclusivities. This system presents several challenges, such as innovation being driven by market size, the partial misalignment between industry research and development priorities and public health goals, market access constraints, and the prevalence of incremental over disruptive innovation. In this context, this study analyses the impact of different research and development incentive mechanisms and alternative frameworks for pharmaceutical innovation and public health. It places specific emphasis on their effects on innovation and patient access to medicines, in terms both of affordability and of availability.
Based on an extensive review of the literature combined with interviews with expert stakeholders, the study offers a range of policy options. These seek to ensure the development of accessible drugs in all clinical areas, improve availability, price and research and development cost transparency, and ensure preparedness in the event of emergencies. Policy options suggested include strengthening EU coordination on intellectual property rights and medicine procurement, reducing the length of exclusivities, and introducing specific incentives (subscription models) de-linked from market size for specific unmet medical needs (antimicrobials and rare diseases with extremely low prevalence). A further suggestion isthe creation of a public infrastructure active throughout the whole drug research and development process. A combination of policies would exceed the sum of its components, by generating additional synergies.
