With 2020 ending, Catenion is now in its seventh year of the annual survey of pharma R&D productivity. Compared to 2019 there was a slight drop in overall R&D productivity – a trend that has started in 2018. While the metric that captures the value of the pipeline vs. R&D spending plus cost of M&A has increased slightly compared with 2019, the long-term ratio that also counts mostly the value of products launched in the last five years on top of the pipeline has decreased in our sample of the top 30 biopharma companies based on pharmaceutical sales. It would be too easy to attribute the slight decrease in R&D productivity to COVID-19. Perhaps it played a role in slowing down recruitment and delaying some readouts, however, its overall impact on the biopharma space has been surprisingly low. In fact, the number of FDA approvals even increased from 48 in 2019 to 53 in 2020.
As every year, there are a number of companies that performed extremely well, these are the top 10 players in...
