The pharmaceutical industry, a strategic sector for Spain and Europe
“We are the industrial area that invests the most in R&D, a productive and exporting engine”.
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Developing and producing new medicines for society is both a privilege and a great responsibility. As an innovative pharmaceutical industry, it is an honour to contribute to improving people’s health, but also to economic growth and social progress. We do so because we are the industrial sector that invests the most in research and development, a productive and exporting engine, and at the same time we are one of the safest and most solid environments to work in, both in terms of stability, equality and diversity.
These are the foundations that have enabled us to position ourselves as an essential sector in our country and in Europe. In Spain, we are working on the implementation of the Strategic Plan for the Pharmaceutical Industry, a commitment made to the Government in December 2022, which sets out three key aspects for the sector: ensuring patient access to innovation, improving the timing and availability of new drugs thanks to a stable, clear, agile and predictable framework; consolidating our country’s leadership in biomedical R&D, with special attention to translational research, nurturing the two-way path between the laboratory and clinical practice; and, finally, strengthening the productive fabric, focusing on employment, growth and less foreign dependence.
In terms of R&D, the sector has just confirmed that its commitment is growing, and at double-digit rates. According to the latest R&D Activities Survey published by Farmaindustria on 13 December, pharmaceutical companies based in Spain set a new investment record in 2022 with almost 1.4 billion euros, 10% more than the previous year.
“In 2022 we beat investment records with 1,400 million”.
Almost half of this investment, moreover, was carried out in research projects in conjunction with hospitals, universities and public and private centres (known as extramural research). The magnitude of this contribution, a true paradigm of public-private collaboration in our country, has been endorsed by the data recently published by the National Statistics Institute (INE) in its statistics on R&D activities, which places the pharmaceutical industry as the leading sector of the Spanish economy in terms of extramural investment, accounting for approximately one third of the total for the entire industrial sector.
Since last year, the pharmaceutical industry has also been the third largest sector in terms of exports in our country, with more than 26,800 million in sales abroad, 53% more than the previous year, thanks in part to covid vaccines.
These figures consolidate the importance of this sector for the country and also for Europe. In fact, the innovative pharmaceutical industry is one of the four strategic industrial sectors – together with the energy, food and digital technologies sectors – set as priorities in Europe, according to the proposal for open strategic autonomy promoted by the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, exercised in the second half of 2023.
Although, as these facts show, the foundations of the biopharmaceutical industry in our country are solid, there is a great opportunity to boost this sector and its contribution to health and the economy. In addition to the three fundamental priorities – improving access to medicines for patients, boosting R&D and increasing industrial capacities in Spain – there are three cross-cutting objectives for us in the coming years: a firm commitment to digitalisation, minimising our environmental footprint and promoting prevention, health education and the proper use of medicines.
“We want to bring clinical trials closer to primary care”.
With these aims, our objective is to continue to be an innovative and benchmark sector in Spain, marked by a vocation for service and in an attitude of dialogue and collaborative work to respond to the challenges that society demands of us. Precisely one of these challenges that we want to respond to in the new year is to bring clinical trials closer to primary care. We want to take advantage of the network of primary care health centres (more than 3,000 in our country), which provides enormous potential for leading clinical trials and represents an opportunity to bring clinical trials closer to patients’ homes, which will result in improved healthcare.
To meet all these objectives, what the pharmaceutical industry needs is stability, predictability and regulatory clarity, and agreed procedures and governance to enable patients’ access to medicines in an agile and equitable manner.
