Madrid, 3rd of April 2006
Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio
Sala F del Complejo Cuzco
Paseo de la Castellana, 162
28071 Madrid

II EUROPEAN MEETING ON PHARMACEUTICAL POLICY
Can the development of new and better drugs coexist with the lasting of the European Health Systems?

Introduction

The Second European Forum on Pharmaceutical Policy is encountered under the pharmaceutical policy programme developed by the sanofi-aventis with the collaboration of Gaspar Casal Foundation.

The necessity of counting on better drugs (incremental innovation) and of discovering new drugs for diseases without previous good treatments (disruptive innovation) is pressing in Europe, if we don't want the difference with the U.S.A to be even greater.

The creation of new drugs is a result of effort, luck, necessity, incentives and policies in unknown percentages. It is also a result of the revolution on the biotechnological, genomic and functional offering, and the knowledge that we start having of the molecular basis of the different diseases. It is being speculated that this emerging biopharmaceutical arsenal could allow us to step from an exhausted R+D model according to the symptoms of the last decade, to another one expected to be healthier due to the biotechnological effort.

Different European policies have cleared the path for legislative harmonization, getting legal, regulatory and administrative dispositions over drugs closer, with the aim of achieving homogeneous decisions in the whole Union and guaranteeing the good functioning of the internal health market. The EMEA, the decision-making organ for drug registration, quotes: "…it is needed to establish a centralized, communitarian, authorizing procedure for the technologically advanced drugs…" The pharmaceutical policy of the European Union, which is fit in the centralization strategy, tries to carry out a difficult task: to make the growth of the autochthonous industry easier so it is not left behind other countries, especially the U.S.A and Japan, and so that it can compete in the global scenario, while maintaining the pharmaceutical consumption between reasonable limits that don't spend out the public budget. The European enlargement will inevitably affect the pharmaceutical expense of the new EU countries. The new European scene will generate tensions. It is an uncertain future that we must face realistically, making the social benefits obtained from the efficient drugs prevail.

The technological advance in health is, in a great measure, a result of determinants that are external to the sector and their policies. There is a high degree of dependence on the other disciplines. The greatest part of the big surgical and diagnostic innovations comes from other areas: computer science, electronics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering… The great radical innovations come as an external impulse to change the organizations and revolt the markets. Although the managing innovations are less frequent than the strictly technical, many times they appear as a survival reaction to a new "disruptive" technology. The greater part of the improvements in medical practice have an incremental nature, the result from a continuous process based on many sequenced improvements, as it happens in research for new drugs.

Objectives

This Second Forum will analyze how incremental and disruptive innovations for new drugs are related, while approaching the economical, innovative and regulatory factors taking part.

Who can be interested

The II European Forum on Pharmaceutical Policy will be held the next 3rd of April 2006 in the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism headquarters. It is expected that this event becomes a meeting point for Spanish authorities (Ministry of Health, Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Industry, and Autonomous Communities), health technologies evaluation agencies, medicines evaluation centres, universities, pharmaceutical firms, specialized foundations, health economics research centres, medical associations,……

PROGRAMME

09.00-09.15