INNOVATION
Celebrating the most innovative companies in healthcare Innovation is a huge category, covering discovery, strategy, marketing, sales, and numerous other disciplines within healthcare. For the last nine years, Idea Pharma has put together The PII, the Pharmaceutical Innovation Index, which aims at ranking companies in their ability to bring products to market and commercialize them successfully, and utilizes a range of clinical, regulatory and commercial metrics to do this, ranging from the corporate level down to individual products. The best news is that most of the upward trending comes from the introduction or expansion of new therapies, an area that has presented difficulties in recent years. Read the details and you’ll see that there is no shortage of robust discovery going on these days. Sources include company websites, third party institutions (e.g. FDA, clinicaltrials.gov), syndicated and analyst reports, etc., which are analyzed and rolled up at company level for innovation and commercialization, and ranked.
Fuller details are available in the PII White Paper, which discusses in greater depth the metrics themselves and also highlights where individual companies excel, or do poorly. OVERVIEW 2018 marked an important year in pharma, with key industryshaping events. We witnessed a record high number of novel drug approvals, suggesting an industry that is boosting productivity while improving collaborations with regulators to progress thera-
47 | HS&M SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
pies through the regulatory finish line. But a good proportion come from small- to mid-sized biotechs (39 of the 59 approvals were from companies which are outside the top 30). Are the smaller players tipping the scale on productivity? Well, maybe, but some of the big pharma companies were also rather busy last year. Pfizer managed to push four new oncology drugs through approval, marking the highest number of novel drug approvals in the industry, while other big pharma players, including Merck, BMS, Astra-
