What are the obstacles to innovation in the pharmaceutical industry?

Pharma urgently needs to produce innovative new therapies if it is to overcome its critical,
long-term challenge, ie the revenue gap produced by the industry’s failure to develop sufficient, new, patent-protected medical therapies to offset the revenues lost as existing products lose their patent protection.

Contributing to this challenge is a relentless downward pricing pressure. “Indeed,” reports
Steven M Paul et al, “for every dollar lost in declining product revenues due to patent expirations by 2012, it has been estimated that large-cap pharmaceutical companies will only be able to replace on average 26 cents with new product revenues.”...