Medicines are innovations

Pharmaceutical development has revolutionised healthcare, and new breakthroughs take place on a continuous basis.  Currently, a growing number of diseases can be treated through medication.

Medicines generate health, better quality and added years to people's lives.

The development of a novel medicine is a long and expensive process. It easily takes from eight to twelve years to develop a molecule through various trial phases into a medicine available to patients. Developing one medicine is today an investment of one billion, even two billion euro.

The pharmaceutical industry is engaged in constant R&D to develop new medicines and therapies. Many pharmaceutical companies re-invest as much as 20% of their operating profit in product development. Medicines are developed by pharmaceutical companies, and also universities and research institutes engage in pharmaceutical research.

Owing to novel pharmacotherapies, a growing number of diseases can be treated outside the hospital, and many operations can be done in day surgery. For example, the treatment of asthma has progressed over the past few years so that specific asthma wards are no longer needed in hospitals as people with asthma can lead an almost normal or entirely normal lives at home, thanks to the medication they receive.

Medications are developing and becoming increasingly customised and individualised. Precision-medicines customised for individual patients will be able to cater for genetic factors, as well as for the nature and course of the disease in question. For example, such individualisation is rapidly taking place in the rheumatism and cancer treatments.

The pharmaceutical branch works relentlessly to be able to cure and even prevent more and more diseases to give hope of recovery to those who do not yet have it.