After recent R&D disappointments, pharma pipelines improving, says Thomson Reuters

The pharmaceutical industry’s research productivity is finally improving after years of disappointment, as drugmakers shift their focus from mass markets to making medicines for rarer, under-treated diseases, according to data from Thomson Reuters’ CMR International unit.

This showed that more new drugs are reaching the market and that the industry has been enjoying higher success rates in the costly final stage of clinical development. The number of innovative medicines, or new molecular entities, launched globally in 2011 hit a 10-year high of 31, up from 21 in 2010.

Furthermore, the tally of drugs terminated in the final Phase III stage of clinical trials dropped markedly, to 45 in the last three years from 53 in 2008-10, according to the 2012 Pharmaceutical R&D Factbook from CMR International.