About the Pharma 2020 series

The Pharmaceutical industry's long successful strategy of placing big bets on a few molecules, promoting them heavily and turning them into blockbusters worked well for many years, but its R&D productivity has now plummeted and the environment’s changing. PwC believes that seven major trends are reshaping the marketplace:

• Instances of chronic disease are increasing, placing even greater pressure on already stretched healthcare budgets
• Healthcare policy-makers and payers are increasingly mandating what doctors can prescribe
• A growing number of healthcare payers are measuring the pharmacoeconomic performance of different medicines. A widespread use of electronic medical records will give them the data they need to insist on outcomes-based pricing
• Boundaries between different forms of healthcare are blurring, as clinical advances render previously fatal diseases chronic and the self-medication sector expands
• Demand for medicines is growing more rapidly in the emerging economies than the industrialized economies
• Governments are beginning to focus on prevention rather than treatment, although they have not yet invested very much in pre-emptive measures; and
• Regulators are becoming more cautious about approving truly innovative medicines.

These trends will compound the challenges Pharma already faces, but they’ll also provide some major opportunities.