Case Study: Big Pharma
Type: Campaign briefings
Date: 17 January 2024
Campaigns: Pharma
The medicines we need to keep us healthy are increasingly controlled by a small number of wealthy corporations. This has an enormous impact on what medicines are produced, who gets to use those medicines, and what price they have to pay to get hold of them. But it’s also having a profound impact on the industry itself – hollowing out the companies involved and making them less able to produce the medicines of tomorrow.
Between 1995 and 2015 in the US, 60 pharmaceutical companies merged into just ten. These corporations make many medicines under patent, giving them explicit monopolies over the drugs to which they own the intellectual property rights.
But this doesn’t mean they discovered these drugs. In fact, most breakthroughs in medicines come through enormous public sector funding, and the work of university departments and small biotech companies. Contrary to what we’re told about private sector innovation, public sector funding is usually most important at the riskiest stage of development.
