Last week, John Carroll of Endpoint News sounded an alarm that the productivity of the biopharmaceutical industry is waning since the FDA has only approved 17 drugs in 2016:
But even with a 4th-quarter burst of approvals, it will be hard for the FDA to avoid seeing a sharp drop in the overall number of market approvals by end of the year, reversing a trend of rising market launches. To be sure, there have been some big approvals this year… But those are the exceptions that proved a fairly grim message on a stall in R&D productivity.
