Exploring the UK’s drug pricing model

In the recent piece, she says demand for iiCON’s clinical trials remains strong but she has broader concerns. Infectious disease treatments are “effectively a broken market because pressures have pushed down the cost of antibiotics to such low levels”.

While low prices are good for patients and the NHS budget, they also mean that the industry is not prepared to invest in antibiotic research any more, she says, and so governments rely on philanthropic and other organisations, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to develop new drugs.

But medical professionals argue that is not enough, and hospitals globally have recorded an alarming rise in infections from superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics, leading to more deaths.

Hemingway warns that if the same were to happen with other drugs, to treat cancer for example, “we are going to break the standard market eventually, leaving the UK in a position where new products would only be developed by government stepping in and subsidising the cost of the research, rather than pharma carrying the cost of that research”.

Companies need a reasonable profit margin, she says. The question is, how much margin is reasonable?

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