French Pharma will have to rise to the challenges of global changes and R&D trends

The French drug industry has been seen as a creator of jobs for some time and over the past 10 years pharmaceutical companies have created an average of 2,000 jobs a year, or 2% employment growth across the board. However, a new study by the A D Little consultancy for the sector trade organization, the LEEM, says the country's drugmakers are confronted by major changes and will need to radically revise their business model in the light of globalization and changes in R&D.

Pressure is faced from a hardening of industry standards, government measures to limit health spending, new entrants to the industry, the risks of production switches out of the country and the effect of both the growth of parallel imports and generics.

The chain from R&D through to production is breaking up because of increasing use of expertise outside the company and the rise of biotechnology which upsets the old internal balances. The study shows in particular that the growth in the pharmaceutical market, in future, will come increasingly from the development of biological drugs. Even if the biological sector remains marginal in volume terms because of the amount of older drug compounds on the world market, biologically-sourced and developed medicines will, the report argues, constitute a significant part in the activity at the new R&D sites set up by the industry.