Via the Institute of Cancer Research:
We set out to assess the current landscape for drug discovery and development by analyzing every cancer drug first licensed through the European Medicines Agency (EMA) from 2000 to 2016.
We identified all cancer drugs that were first licensed by the EMA and listed on its database from Jan. 1, 2000, until Dec. 31, 2016.
We chose to look at licensing through the EMA because of its relevance to drug access in the U.K. We recorded both the first drug authorization and all subsequent licensed indications. To look for changing trends over time, we split the data into two consecutive time periods, from 2000 to 2008, and from 2009 to 2016, and then carried out comparative analyses.
We examined how quickly drugs are moving along the development pipeline from their initial discovery through clinical trials and on to EMA authorization and then appraisal by NICE. We also assessed how innovative each drug was, in order to evaluate what difference this made to its chances of being successfully approved for NHS patients.
Nick Jones of BD Consulting conducted data collection and analysis with the policy team at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), overseen by the ICR’s scientific leadership.
