Ready to drive access to medicines
Date
24 Jul 2019
Sections
Health & Consumers
Medicines for Europe is ready to engage with the EU to drive the access to medicines agenda in line with the European Council declaration of 20th June on good healthcare access. Our industry supplies close to 70% of prescription medicines and plays a fundamental role in lifting barriers for patient access to therapy. Generic medicines have doubled access to therapy in major chronic diseases over the last 10 years and biosimilar medicines offer a similar hope for patients requiring biological medicines. Value added medicines can empower patients and healthcare practitioners to improve treatment options – especially for chronic care.
To achieve equity of access to medicines, the EU needs focused pharmaceutical policies that stimulate competition in the off-patent medicine market:
- Removing barriers to generic, biosimilar and value added medicines competition at the expiry of patents.
- Committing to strong generic and biosimilar medicine uptake policies for maximum cost-effectiveness.
- Investing the dividends of competition into expanded access to medicines for patients – using generic, biosimilar and value added medicines as first line treatment as well as new on-patent medicines for patients in need as second line.
- Incentivising more investment in pharmaceutical manufacturing to guarantee secure supplies for European patients – especially for older essential generic medicines like antibiotics or injectable cancer medicines.
- Optimising the regulatory system for off-patent medicines based on sound science, the expanded use of IT tools to reduce administrative redundancies and stopping the unethical duplication of clinical studies.
- Enabling manufacturers to invest in continuous innovation of well-established molecules – including in digital technologies – to empower patients and healthcare practitioners to improve on existing treatments.
Equitable access to medicines should be the mainstay of an efficient, sustainable and cost-effective pharmaceutical policy of the European Union.
Find out more about Medicines for Europe’s policy priorities for the incoming European Institutional mandate, Together for Health here https://www.medicinesforeurope.com/together4health/