In recent years, the global life sciences market has come under competitive pressure as it moves from manufacturing ‘blockbuster’ drugs to more specialised medicines. To gain an insight into some of the business challenges facing pharmaceutical and biotech companies, Freya Purnell spoke with Jurgen Bauer, partner and global life sciences leader, Lodestone Management Consultants.
Industry challenges
Lodestone Management Consultants has a strong global life sciences practice, working with many of the large pharmaceutical companies, generics manufacturers and smaller biotech companies on business transformation and systems integration projects, and Bauer says the company has observed a significant shift in the industry in recent years.
Throughout the 1990s and into the early part of this decade, most of the products in the pharmaceutical industry were “big blockbusters – usually chemistry-based, manufactured in large volumes for large patient bases”, he says. With the emergence of new technology, biotech-based pharmaceuticals allow medicine to be targeted at much smaller patient groups with complex conditions. A 2009 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Pharma 2020: Marketing the future, found that the global market for specialised medicines, which accounted for 44 per cent of worldwide prescription drug spending in 2008, could be twice the size of the current market for all prescription drugs by 2020.
Click here to read the full article in the December 2010 edition of Inside SAP.
