Several recent books have criticized the pharmaceutical industry for developing too many "follow-on" or "me-too" drugs--a name given to drugs that work the same way as pioneering drugs that create a new class of treatments. Do follow-on drugs raise costs while diverting R&D funds from true innovation, and should the FDA raise the bar for approving follow-on drugs? Or are these drugs just competition at work, generating lower prices and better products? These and other questions will be addressed by a panel that will include a presentation by Joseph A. DiMasi--of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development--who has just completed a new study with colleague Cherie Paquette on "The Economics of Follow-on Drug Research and Development: Trends in Entry Rates and the Timing of Development." The study was recently published in PharmacoEconomics.
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