No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2025
Costs for pharmaceutical products are increasing. Pharmaceutical companies claim that high research and development (R&D) costs are the reason for the steep price increase of new products. However, there exists little data to support such claims; there is a lack of transparency in R&D cost reporting. This research intends to analyze and to disaggregate the costs of pharmaceutical R&D.
Studies on the costs of introducing new medications to the market can differ substantially in their methodology, their origin of data, and their results. A scoping review was conducted on costs of R&D for pharmaceutical products using Embase, PubMed, and EconLit, using a combination of the terms “drug research and development” and “costs” or “drug research and development” and “expenditure.” Additionally, semi structured interviews with 16 experts from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers, and not-for-profit pharmaceutical companies were conducted to identify the main driving factors for rising costs of new drugs.
Out of 24 studies that analyzed mixed therapeutic fields, the five highest cost estimates had affiliations with industry or received funding from pharmaceutical companies. Non-affiliated researchers are unable to reproduce studies that use confidential data and therefore cannot check the validity of the results. Additionally, different definitions for R&D make analyzing costs challenging. The interviewees emphasized that driving factors influencing costs for pharmaceutical R&D are therapeutic indication, drug complexity, number of patients in clinical trials, length of the development process, and attrition rates.
Due to the diverse nature of drug development and the confidential information held by pharmaceutical companies, it is a challenge to provide an exact assessment of the average costs of pharmaceutical R&D. Transparency policies with well-defined definitions for R&D are necessary to level the information asymmetries between the private and the public at price negotiations.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.