Are U.S. drug makers more innovative than their European counterparts? The answer is yes, according to a 2006 paper published in the journal Health Affairs that examined the number of first-in-class medicines that were brought to market by U.S., European and Japanese pharma and biotech companies from 1982 to 2003. But considered another way — How much innovation do you get for each dollar of R&D? — you get a different answer, according to a paper published on-line at Health Affairs today , The author of the study, Donald Light , an academic doc who just started a visiting professorship at Stanford, reanalyzed the data from the 2006 paper by controlling for the size of companies’ investment in research and development. All other assumptions remained unchanged from the original study, said Light. Light found that U.S. companies actually discovered fewer new drugs than

you’d expect, given their proportion of R&D spending. Europe brought more new treatments to market than would have been expected from its proportion of R&D dollars. And Japanese drug makers were the most productive, according to the reanalysis. “It would appear that American research provides poorer value,” said Light. U.S. research productivity has been “low and flat in proportion to the large company investments in R&D, while the number of major new drugs credited to Europe is high and increasing in proportion to company investments. Why is American research performance not better?” The work was funded by the TI Pharma project , a collaboration of industry and academic partners in the Netherlands. Drug industry partners on the project include Amgen, GlaxoSmithKline anad Schering-Plough, according to the group’s website.

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European Drug Makers: More Innovative Than U.S. Companies?