November 2016
Featured in this insight: Financial services, Medical & healthcare, Public health & wellbeing
Survey finds 50 per cent of UK’s R&D spend is within pharma: According to a pharmaceutical survey by PwC – which analysed 1,000 large corporations – some 50 per cent of all corporate research and development spending in the United Kingdom has been conducted within the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. This trend is expected to occur again around the world in the coming years.
Behind the vast majority of the industry’s investment are GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, making up £7.5billion of the £7.9billion spent in total. The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries was found to make up 48 per cent of all corporate research and development in the United Kingdom.
The pharmaceuticals industry is currently being moulded by issues such as aging populations and the demand for more sophisticated treatments, as well as the Government initiative, the Accelerated Access Review, which helps speed up the rate in which drugs are able to enter the market. PwC said that these issues are expected to drive an increase in spending that will make the healthcare and pharmaceuticals industries the largest source of global research and development by 2018.
Worldwide, the healthcare and pharmaceuticals sectors make up approximately one fifth of research and development.
Investment in research and development does not only drive technological improvements, but it is a core driver in increasing productivity and economic wealth.
The healthcare industry is one of the three sectors which PwC has tracked since 2005 and in that time, research and development spend has increased year on year.
Even though GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca have a combined UK investment of £7.9billion, neither of the companies have made it onto the list of the top five global pharmaceutical spenders. At the top of the list is Roche and Novartis of Switzerland.
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