Deloitte survey has underlined how difficult has become for the industry: on one side is required to spend much more money on R&D to develop new drugs in order to stay competitive, but on the other it is also facing criticism from politicians ( Read Donald Trump interview on Time Magazine ) over to high consumer price.

The prospective is not good as the projected returns are considered poor, having fallen to 3.7% in 2016, and at the same time the cost of developing a drug has risen to more than $1.5bn.

Furthermore, Deloitte studies suggest that the pricing pressure had meant that peak sales were falling despite product launches and the average peak sales have more than halved this year.

“As costs per product remain high, sales projections decline, and given it now takes the industry over 14 years to launch a drug, real questions should be raised about productivity and returns on innovation”, said Colin Terry, a director in Deloitte’s life sciences practice.

Finally, the Deloitte experts thinks that merge and acquisitions amongst large drug companies will increase in order to try to improve R&D returns.

The report’s authors note that pharma companies can do more to streamline the R&D process by introducing more automation and making more use of data to accelerate trial times.

Read the full article in pdf:  Finalcial Times-12/14/2016