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Total pipeline of pharmaceutical companies reaches a record high – 22,921 medicines are currently being developed

Despite the difficult economic times, pharmaceutical companies have never developed as many new drugs as now.

22,921 – that’s the number of drug compounds currently in development (16 May 2024). Ian Lloyd, Senior Director at the Global Pharmaceutical Intelligence firm Citeline, said that after checking Citeline’s database on behalf of Life Science Sweden.

Ian Lloyd has been the author of the report Pharma R&D Annual Review for Citeline for more than 30 years. When the data for the latest report was compiled on 2 January this year, a total of 22,825 different drug substances were under development, and the number has increased even more since then.

The fact that the number of drugs being developed is now peaking is no surprise to Mr Lloyd. The total number of drugs being developed by companies has been steadily increasing since he first started compiling Citeline’s annual reports in the first part of the 1990s.

Most of the drugs being developed today are for cancer, and for many years, pharmaceutical companies’ investments in oncology have increased steadily.

“Ever since I started working on this, every year without exception, cancer drugs have accounted for an increasing share of the total pipeline,” says Ian Lloyd. 

Overall, more than 40% of all drugs under development are targeting cancer, and according to Ian Lloyd, the figure was around 20% in the early 1990s.

Another trend is that gene and cell therapies are playing an increasingly important role in companies’ research, as indicated in Citeline’s report.

The pharmaceutical company with the most drugs in development is the Swiss company Roche, with 218 drug candidates in their pipeline. They are followed by the US company Pfizer, the Swedish-British company Astra Zeneca and the US company Eli Lilly.

Pharmaceuticals in the pipeline 2024 (2023)
Roche 218 (194)
Pfizer 205 (171)
AstraZeneca 166 (155)
Eli Lilly 159 (135)
Bristol-Myers Squibb 158 (175)
Novartis 154 (191)
Johnson & Johnson 150 (156)
Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals 147 (106)
Merck & Co 145 (151)
Sanofi 142 (146)
Source: Citeline

A Chinese pharmaceutical company is in the top ten companies with the most drug candidates for the first time. It is Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, which takes eighth place. However, overall, the United States still accounts by far for the largest share of drug development in the world, with about 50% of all drug compounds being developed there.

The data on the number of drugs in each company’s pipeline differs in some cases between the companies’ own data and Citeline’s. For example, according to Pfizer’s own data, it currently has 113 compounds in development, while Citeline states that Pfizer has 205 compounds in development. According to Mr Lloyd, this is due to the fact that companies sometimes omit early-stage drugs from their public disclosures.

“The bigger the company, the less likely it is to include preclinical compounds in its own public disclosures. In our reports, we include all drug candidates that come to our attention. For example, substances mentioned at conferences or in scientific journals that can be linked to a particular company and which the companies do not publicise themselves.”

How reliable are your estimates? Can you be sure that the number of medicines in development is really approaching 23,000?

“It’s difficult to say for sure whether all these substances are in the pipeline. However, we are very keen to remove substances from our list if we can see that they are no longer in development. If we don’t receive any information in a year indicating that a drug project, previously registered by us, is ongoing, we look at it carefully to find out if there is any indication that it is still in active development and if not, we remove it from our database.”

You can read more about pharmaceutical companies’ pipelines in the next issue of Life Science Sweden, which will be published in the first week of June.

This is how ‘pipeline’ is defined in the report

The medicines included in Citeline’s Pharma R&D Annual Review are all medicines under development by pharmaceutical companies, from preclinical through late-stage development to authorisation.

Authorised drugs are still included if they are in development for additional indications or markets. Medicines that are no longer in development are not included. Data for the latest report was collected on 2 January 2024.

Source: Citeline

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