Our industries provide sustainable access to high quality medicines for all European patients, for generic, biosimilar and value added medicines. Every single day, our industries increase access to the best standard of care in all therapeutic areas.
Between 2005 and 2015, for the same budget, generic competition allowed twice as many patients access to medicines for key therapeutic areas such as diabetes, depression, epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, asthma/COPD or gastro-intestinal disease.
Biosimilar medicines have also increased access to treatment with complex biological medicines. For instance, the introduction of biosimilar filgrastim, used to treat the consequences of chemotherapy, increased patient access by 44% across Europe. Not only could more patients get access to this treatment, physicians were also able to use the medicine earlier in the treatment cycle, to the benefit of the patient.
Why should you care about medicines policy, and what needs to be done?
Because of ageing populations, budgetary constraints and rising healthcare costs – not helped by inefficiency and waste in the system – European healthcare faces unprecedented and growing pressures; pressures that are already threatening the viability of the European healthcare system. Something must be done to safeguard European citizens’ access to healthcare.
We launched the Access to Medicines project aiming to make the case for ensuring the sustainability of European healthcare systems, and a common-sense approach to make use of the opportunity that generic, biosimilar and value added medicines do and can bring.