IMS Health predicts Rx market will experience decline

NORWALK, Conn. Despite always having been profitable despite cut-throat competition, the pharmaceutical market will experience a decline in growth this year, thanks to the global economic downturn, according to a new report from IMS Health.

The research firm forecasted that global pharmaceutical sales would exceed $750 billion this year, compared to the more than $820 billion forecasted in October, thanks to the global economic slump. Nevertheless, economic troubles won’t hit the drug industry as hard as they’ll hit other industries, and IMS expects a rebound through 2010, based on its IMS Market Prognosis series of publications.

“To the now-familiar factors impeding market growth such as patent expirations, a slowdown in innovative product launches and hurdles imposed by payers on market access and acceptance, we can now overlay the economic downturn,” IMS SVP healthcare insight Murray Aitken stated. “There is a clear correlation between demand for medicines and key macroeconomic variables such as GDP, consumer spending and government expenditures.”

The report also noted that “pharmerging” markets would contribute more than half of global market growth this year and sustain an average 40% contribution through 2013, growing collective at a 13 to 16% pace over the same period. China, now the sixth largest pharmaceutical market, could become the third largest by 2011. Meanwhile, mature markets in Japan, Canada and Europe will contribute less growth, about 1-4%.

Many of the innovative treatments to be launched over the next two years will be aimed at narrow patient populations, the report said, with two-thirds of the 50-60 new drugs aimed at the specialty market. New drugs to be launched this year and next year will treat diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, resistant hypertension, asthma, pneumococcal disease and others. Expected drug launches include as many as 10 potential blockbusters.