Citeline Pharma 2023年研发年度回顾

by Ian Lloyd, Senior Director, Pharmaprojects at Citeline Reimagining the futureone chapter at a time Introduction Welcome to Pharmaprojects’ 2023 review oftrends in pharmaceutical R&D. For over 30 yearsnow, I’ve been taking an annual look at theevolution of pharma R&D, and in this article, I’llexamine the state of play at the start of 2023.We’ll assess industry trends by examining thepipeline by company, therapeutic area, disease,target, and drug type, using data from primarilyPharmaprojects, part of the Citeline suite ofproducts, which has been tracking global drugdevelopment since 1980. This report will be followedup by our annual supplement reviewing the NewActive Substance launches for the year just passed.But here, we’ll tell the story of pharma R&D as it istoday: an epic tale, with a rich cast of charactersand a global scope, and no doubt a number ofunexpected plot twists. Hopefully, it will be a realpage-turner! the best attention-grabbing first sentences, but anumber come up regularly in top 10s, so there issome degree of consensus of what constitutes aclassic first sentence construction. Among thoserepeatedly cited are: “It is a truth universallyacknowledged, that a single man in possession of agood fortune, must be in want of a wife”—Jane Austen,Pride and Prejudice (1813); “Itwas a bright cold day in April, and the clocks werestriking thirteen” — George Orwell,1984 (1949);“If you really want to hear about it, the first thingyou’ll probably want to know is where I was born,and what my lousy childhood was like, and howmy parents were occupied and all before they hadme, and all that David Copperfield kind of cr*p, butI don’t feel like going into it, if you want to knowthe truth” — JD Salinger,The Catcher in the Rye(1951), and “All this happened, more or less” — KurtVonnegut,Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). But perhapsone of the most famous opening lines to a novelin history which best describes the experience ofpharma over the past few years can be borrowedfrom Charles Dickens’ seminal 1859 opus,A Taleof Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was theworst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was theage of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it wasthe epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light,it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring ofhope, it was the winter of despair.” Regular readers of this report (which has beenrunning since 1993, so is presented here in its31st edition) will know that in recent years, I’vethreaded a different theme through each edition,to highlight points, to draw analogies, and to adda little character into what could otherwise be arather lengthy narrative through a potentially drearyparade of statistics, charts, and tables. Themesselected so far have included astronomy, movies,the natural world, music, food and drink, sciencefiction, and, last year, travel. This year, I decidedto make a few nods to the world of literature andbooks to help illustrate my points. Storytelling isas old as humanity itself, and fiction has alwaysbeen used as a proxy to help us to understand thereal world. The best literature enlightens, thrills,amuses, and engages the reader. I’m certainlyno Shakespeare, but I hope that my words willthrow some light on the current state of thepharmaceutical industry, in the same way that agreat novel does on the human condition. Of course, it’s the COVID-19 pandemic that I’mthinking of here. A globally cataclysmic event, itthrew the entire world into turmoil, and placed thepharmaceutical industry firmly at the center of theaction. Suddenly, drug R&D was supposed to rideto a heroic rescue, but at the same time, a wholeset of new barriers were being thrown in the wayof its delivering the much-desired happy ending.Clinical trials had to be paused, lab workers foundthemselves marooned at home, and the whole scriptfor drug development had to be rewritten. So, what will be my opening lines to this year’smagnum opus? A memorable set of bon motsto pique the interest of the reader is important.Various online polls pick different books as having Introduction Continued But, as any good author will tell you, withoutjeopardy, there’s no tension and thus no story.What has followed, during a time when many ofus felt like we were living through a dystopiandrama worthy of Margaret Atwood, was analmost Homeric quest for a solution to an almostunprecedented crisis. With the stoicism worthyof Thomas Hardy’s Gabriel Oak(Far from theMadding Crowd, 1874), the industry hunkereddown and just got on with it. Almost unbelievably,the golden fleece of a vaccine was found in anincredibly short timespan — its discovery turnedout to be more a novella than the expectedWarand Peace-like weighty tome by Leo Tolstoy (1869)— like weighty tome — allowing the world to returnrapidly to some kind of normality, and the pharmaindustry to emerge as a Gandalf-ish wizard leadingthe people to peace and prosperity. At the timeof writing, in January 2023, it feels, in the Westat least