Innovator Organizations in New Drug Development: Assessing the Sustainability of the Biopharmaceutical Industry

The way new medicines are discovered and brought to market has fundamentally changed over the last 30 years. Our previous analysis showed that biotechnology companies had contributed significantly to the US Food and Drug Administration approval of new molecular entities up to the mid-1980s, when the trends started to decline. Although intriguing, the focus on biotechnology necessarily precluded the wider question of how the biopharmaceutical industry has been delivering on its goals to develop new drugs. Here, we present a comprehensive analysis of all biopharmaceutical innovators and uncover unexpected findings. The present biopharmaceutical industry grew steadily from 1800 to 1950 and then stagnated for two decades, before a burst of growth attributable to the biotechnology revolution took place; but consolidation has reduced the number of active and independent innovators to a level not experienced since 1945. The trajectories and trends we observe raise fundamental questions about biopharmaceutical innovators and the sustainability of the drug-development enterprise.