Investment in research and recovery of production, bases to revive the economy

Source: www.actasanitaria.com

“Investment in research and the recovery of offshoring production are the bases to reactivate the Spanish economy from the pharmaceutical industry”, as detailed by Farmaindustria, at the business summit ‘Spanish companies leading the future’, of the Business Confederation of Business Organizations ( CEOE), among a battery of possible solutions offered by the sector to face the crisis caused by the coronavirus.

“A large part of the population has been able to become aware of the importance of having strategic industrial sectors, such as the innovation in medicines, which not only can better withstand the onslaught of such a powerful crisis, but are really in a position to provide solutions to get out of it to society as a whole, ”said the president of the bosses of the pharmaceutical industry in Spain, Martín Sellés.

In line with the speech that the president of Farmaindustria made a few days ago in the Commission for Social and Economic Reconstruction, in the Congress of Deputies, the vice president of this institution, Juan López Belmonte, put on the table the four main objectives on those that the pharmaceutical industry can help economic recovery.

The first is to act on employment. “We create quality employment, highly qualified and with permanent contracts. We have almost 6,000 people working in R&D and 65 percent of them are women. Between direct, indirect and induced employment, we employ more than 200,000 people in Spain. This quality job is the one that all countries want to create, because it is the one that generates wealth and resists crises better. Under the right conditions, we can grow and provide our country with qualified jobs, with projection and linked to innovation ”, explained Juan López Belmonte.

Facing future pandemics
The second proposal is based on increasing industrial investments by creating new production plants in Spain or modernizing or expanding the current ones. “The need that Spain and Europe have to recover production that has been delocalized in Asian countries in recent years has become evident during this crisis. Such high dependence on the outside is a risk in a field as critical as that of the drug. We are in a position to recover part of that lost production, and that has a sanitary value, but also an economic and social one, since it would allow us to generate a productive fabric, export and employment in our country, ”stated the vice-president of Farmaindustria.

The third objective is to promote investments in basic and clinical research and increase the collaboration of pharmaceutical companies with institutions to strengthen R&D in the country. “We can try to bring new basic research centers to Spain. In total, our country invests 1.24 percent of GDP in R&D. Many countries around us dedicate more than 2 percent, and the European Union (EU) average is 2.2 percent. It is evident that we have to improve these figures, and we can help ”, López Belmonte specified.

The fourth pillar involves creating the right environment to better face future pandemics and other health emergencies. “The strengthening of this biomedical research ecosystem and a productive fabric that adds guarantees of production in our country of certain essential medicines is essential to ensure the strengthening of the public health system and underpin the foundations of a model capable of facing new crises with guarantees sanitary ”, maintain the heads of Farmaindustria.

In order to put these proposals into practice, this employer claims “a medium-long-term country strategy, a stable and predictable regulatory environment, without unilateral structural changes, that is, not agreed with the industry. In short, a framework that makes it easier for the sector to define long-term plans that allow for investments to be sustained over time. It cannot be otherwise in the field of medicine, the development of which involves 10-12 years of work, high costs (€ 2.5 billion) and high risk ”.

It is time to revive the economy through research and recovery of production in the pharmaceutical sector. At Distefar we support this and we believe it is essential to strengthen the pharmaceutical industry for the revival of the country.