Nutraceuticals "Set To Outstrip Drug Markets"

The new US Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, coupled with the Republican landslide, will mean a dramatic change in the drug, health and food industries by the year 2000, Steven DeFelice, chairman of the Foundation for Innovation in medicine has told a FIM-organized conference on nutraceutical research.

Nutraceuticals have the potential to dwarf the world drug market, but public information on them is flawed and lacks clinical basis, and the early Nutrition Labeling Education Act caused a shutdown in research to support claims, he said. Nutraceuticals range from isolated nutrients, dietary supplements and diets to genetically-engineered designer foods, herbal products and processed foods such as cereals, soups and beverages.

Nutraceuticals' US potential is $250 billion, two and a half times as big as the prescription and over-the-counter drug markets combined, and the European Union market at about the same level, said Mr DeFelice. This will be a proprietary pharmacy OTC and a supplement market, and competition will be tough in ten years so the food and OTC industries should get patents, and move quickly. To be successful, a product must have clinical results done at the best institutions with data published in prestigious peer-review journals, he said; nutraceuticals research is more likely to use surrogate markers than the clinical endpoints used by drugs. The products' growth will expand the health care market but only if they have substantiated claims, and this expansion will be to the detriment of the food and drug industries, whose current products will suffer.