The protection of intellectual property, key to the development of new medicines
Source: immedicohospitalario.es
The regulatory ecosystem for the protection of intellectual property in Europe works. The set of laws, regulations and incentives developed by the European Union to promote innovation favor, in the field of the pharmaceutical industry, an annual investment of around 35,000 million euros in biomedical R & D activities, generating 700,000 jobs throughout the continent (118,000 of them dedicated specifically to research) and, more importantly, the development of new medicines to offer therapeutic alternatives to all types of diseases.
On the occasion of the celebration, on Friday, April 26, of the World Intellectual Property Day, the European employers’ association of the innovative pharmaceutical industry, Efpia in its acronym in English, has put into circulation an informative video in which it becomes clear the need to protect these innovative ideas that, with a lot of time and effort, can lead to great progress in the field of biomedical innovation and new medicines.
The set of intellectual property protection measures in force in Europe, such as patents, data protection and complementary protection certificates, offers guarantees to companies that investigate and develop new medicines that if one of their innovative drugs is finally approved and it reaches the patients, it will have an adequate temporary period to try to recover the investment made and generate resources that can be reinvested in new biomedical R & D projects.
High cost and high risk
This is critical in drug research, because of the high cost in resources and time and the high risk involved. Making a drug available to patients requires 10-12 years of work and 2.5 billion dollars, and only one in 10,000 compounds under investigation will reach the market one day. Along with this, only three of every ten drugs marketed recover the investment made, thanks to the above-mentioned high costs, the strong therapeutic competence and the progressive specificity of the treatments, increasingly oriented to specific patient profiles, among other issues .
On the other hand, the established legal framework also ensures that, once this term of protection has expired, the entry into the market of generic medicines and the consequent price reduction for health service providers will generate sufficient savings for the arrival in clinical practice and of new innovative therapeutic solutions. It is a virtuous circle that deserves to be reinforced, as it is remembered on this World Day.
The innovative effort of the pharmaceutical industry has a huge impact on the health of the population. The companies in the sector develop more than 95% of the medicines available in the world. And these treatments cure diseases or significantly improve the quality of life of patients. It is enough to think about the increase in survival in cancer, in the change in the prognosis of pathologies such as rheumatology or in how new drugs against hepatitis C already allow thinking about the eradication of the pathology. Or even how in the last decades, once deadly ailments, such as HIV / AIDS, have ceased to be so. In the first decade of the century the human being has gained 1.74 years of life expectancy, and 73% of that increase is due to innovative medicines, according to various scientific studies.
A successful research model
These data corroborate the success of the biomedical research model led by pharmaceutical companies, which rises on an investment of more than 130,000 million euros per year worldwide, which evolves towards greater openness and collaboration with third parties (hospitals, universities and public and private research centers) and that is now on the doorstep, with genomics and proteomics, of new treatments that will change the future of many diseases.
Europe is a leader in biomedical innovation – where the pharmaceutical industry is at the forefront of all industrial sectors in R & D investment – thanks to the legal framework for the protection of intellectual property that offers investors and companies the necessary security to invest in the continent and, by virtue of the collaborative evolution of the R & D model, develop a solid and avant-garde industrial and research fabric.
To the health value that the pharmaceutical industry contributes, we must add its decisive role in the export capacity of the European Union (it is, with 360,000 million per year, the fourth export sector) and the fact of being one of the most competitive pillars of the continental economy, as demonstrated by its remarkable contribution to economic recovery after the crisis. It is also one of the determining sectors in the European commitment to the knowledge economy, and will continue to be so as the current industrial property protection system works and continues to be useful to encourage the research and development of new treatments for the patients who need them.
In this context, it is worrisome, as the Efpia itself has pointed out, measures such as the revision of European legislation on the Supplementary Protection Certificate (CCP) that allows the introduction of a manufacturing exception in favor of generics, given the consequences of this regulatory change recently approved can cause in the system of protection of industrial property. Modifications of this type in the European regulatory framework are even more alarming compared to the trend in other geographical areas and in other economic sectors.
At Distefar, we support the development of new medicines to offer therapeutic alternatives to all types of diseases.
