European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides, along with Christopher Fearne, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Health of Malta, visited the Medichem manufacturing sites as part of the Commissioner’s visit to Malta to speak at the Medicines for Europe Annual Conference. The conference has taken place from the 14th to the 16th of June 2023 and has been a platform for discussing policies and measures that will contribute to the improvement of patient health and the competitive pharmaceutical environment in Europe.
The EU has initiated a major overhaul of EU pharma legislation ranging from regulation to intellectual property and supply chains. The off-patent medicines industry is fully engaged to ensure that reforms transform healthcare delivery and access for patients. Generic and biosimilar medicines help the majority of patients with major chronic diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions and others.
Value added medicines promise affordable, patient-centred innovation which can address unmet medical needs and the crisis in hospitals with personnel shortages and greater demand for healthcare.
As trade associations representing off-patent medicines and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) large, medium and small companies in Europe, directly providing highly skilled jobs, investing heavily in manufacturing R&D and accounting for 24% of API global production and 70% of prescription medicines supplied in Europe, this initiative demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of the complex challenges faced by the European pharmaceutical industry and addresses a pressing concern: the need for a coordinated and robust approach to safeguard the medicine supply chain in Europe.
Generic and biosimilar medicines significantly lower healthcare treatment costs and are essential for enabling competition and vastly improved access to medicines. The stated aim of the EU pharmaceutical and IP legislative reform is to encourage the immediate launch of generic and biosimilar medicines once IP protections expire. The 2023 Medicines for Europe Legal Affairs Conference debated these much-needed reforms for access to medicines.
Adrian Van Der Hoven joins panelists elaborating on the EU Pharma Package and the potential showdown with the pharma sector and called Europe out for being late to the Artificial Intelligence party.