Maxim Kots, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, Co-Founder of Neurotrition Research Lab, shared on LinkedIn:
“The Chairs of AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Chiesi Group, Ipsen, GSK, Novo Nordisk, Novartis, Roche and Sanofi published an open letter with a rather direct title:
Europe Is Losing the Pharma Investment Race.
I was pleasantly surprised to see it, because over the summer I wrote several posts looking at the same problem from the clinical development side.
It is difficult and strategically dangerous to ignore the fact that in 2013, Europe accounted for 22% of global commercial clinical trials and by 2023, this had fallen to 12%.
And this happened while the total number of commercial trials worldwide increased by 38%. So Europe is not being affected by a market decline trend.
The market is growing, but Europe is losing its share.
EFPIA – European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations estimates that this decline represents around 60,000 fewer clinical trial places in Europe. And clinical trials are not only about patients and access to experimental medicines:
the industry clinical trial ecosystem generates an estimated €35.7 billion in annual GVA and supports more than 165,000 jobs across Europe.
Then clinical trials are only the beginning of the story. Once a medicine has successfully completed development and received European approval, patients still wait an average of 597 days for availability.
Among medicines covered by the 2025 WAIT analysis, only 28% were fully available on public reimbursement lists across Europe.
49% were not available.
I think the discussion about European pharmaceutical competitiveness becomes misleading because it is trying to focus on one issue, whether regulation, patents, pricing, clinical trials or reimbursement.
In reality, we are dealing with structural decline today, which is affected by a combination of different factors.
Europe remains one of the world’s strongest scientific regions. It has outstanding universities, investigators, hospitals, pharma companies and biomedical expertise.
Yet its share of global pharmaceutical R&D has declined from 43% in 1990 to 31% today, which is still a significant share.
According to the Chairs’ letter, more than $600 billion in pharmaceutical investment has been announced in the US and China in just the last two years.
Investment decisions are not made at the end of this chain. They reflect expectations about the whole chain.
- Can a programme be developed efficiently?
- Can trials be run competitively?
- Can a successful medicine reach patients?
- Does the market justify funding the next programme?
- And many others.
This is what connects the numbers. The question is not whether Europe still has the science.
It clearly does.
The question is how effectively Europe converts that science into clinical development, into medicines reaching patients, and ultimately into the next cycle of investment, so that it can remain one of the world’s leading centres of pharma innovation and scientific research.”
You can also read: Sjoerd Hubben: A Call to Strengthen Europe’s Pharma Innovation Ecosystem
