The pharmaceutical industry has invested 9.4% more in r & d in 2004

The general director of Farmaindustria, Humberto Arnés, stood out in Santander, in the breast of the V Meeting of the Pharmaceutical Industry Spaniard organised by the International University Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP), that in Spain the costs in R&D of the pharmaceutical industry have grown to the 22,1 percent like annual average between the years 2000 and 2003, and that the estimates of growth in 2004 situate in the 9,4 percent, reaching the 662 million euros.

These data situate to the pharmaceutical industry in command of the intensive sectors in R&D in Spain, by in front even of industries like the ones of the car or aerospace. However, Humberto Arnés remembered that Spain is, together with France and Italy, the European country where the products launched in the last three years have the lowest prices, and even if they analyse only the products launched in 2004 observes that the differentials of prices increase and that Spain appears clearly like the country with the lowest prices of Europe.

On the other hand, the world-wide effort in pharmaceutical R&D keeps growing and has duplicated in a decade, until surpassing in 2003 the 49.000 million dollars, what contrasts with an inferior increase of the new chemical entities registered.

The general director of Farmaindustria did upsetting in that the innovation that llevar the pharmaceutical industry is a complex phenomenon and no linear, that contributes multiple profits to the patients and the society in a multiplicity of dimensions. “This value for the society -added- need to be recognised and recompensado”. In this sense, warned of the risk that involves the adoption of measures “little rigorous” that desincentiven the innovation, so much from the social punto (medicine of poor and rich), sanitary ware (lower availability of treatments), economic (feasibility of the companies, greater prices on a long-term basis), as industrial (lower investments, loss of “confidence country”).

By all this, pleaded for to preserve a strategic industry for the country for considering, besides, that precisely because of the R&D that llevar the pharmaceutical sector has a lower risk of deslocalización that other industries, adding that in the current surroundings of the Spanish industry, 69% describes as “high” the risk of deslocalización of companies to other countries, percentage that rises to 94%, 84% and 80% in the case of the textile sectors, of toys and of footwear.