A 2011 Wakeup Call for Pharmaceutical Companies

2010 was wrought with challenges for the pharmaceutical industry with the aftermath of the global recession continuing to put pressure on drug discovery, compliance and customer interactions. These pressures have been further exacerbated by ongoing industry challenges including a shrinking drug pipeline, in which the numbers of New Molecular Entities or NMEs being approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have decreased in the last several years. This is the end of the blockbuster drug era, and larger pharmaceutical companies face growing competition from the generics.

In addition, most large pharmaceutical companies are facing a high proportion of patent expirations between 2011 and 2014, which analysts expect will negatively impact over $150 billion of revenues of branded drugs. Demand from emerging markets is also shifting traditional sales and marketing practices. Pharmaceutical companies are exploring non-traditional customer bases and must tackle the associated challenges that come from dealing with new markets, such as dealing with unstructured distribution, counterfeiting and lower price points.

Challenges are not new to the pharmaceutical industry. Will pharmaceutical companies get a break in 2011? What are the trends that are impacting the pharmaceutical industry? Here are our predictions for 2011.