Drs. Mark McClellan and Gregory Daniel of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy outline the development of a database that provides a more comprehensive, publicly-available measure of innovation. Currently, the most common metrics for innovation are development time, R&D spending, and failure rate of drugs in clinical development. However, these data are proprietary, incomplete, inconsistent, and difficult to access.
The authors identified four alternative measures of innovation: characteristics of approved drugs, impact of new drugs on health outcomes, drivers of development success (including characteristics of failed drugs), and macro influences on innovation (such as effective patient advocacy and accelerated approval). They recommend that these categories serve as building blocks for the development of a publicly-available platform for improved pharmaceutical innovation analysis.
Read more in “Improving Pharmaceutical Innovation By Building A More Comprehensive Database On Drug Development and Use.” Health Affairs