A primer on formularies

Hydery and Reddy (2024) provide a nice primer on drug formularies. Below is a quick overview. What is a formulary? A formulary is a continually updated list of medications, products, and technologies supported by current evidence-based medicine, as well as the judgment of physicians, pharmacists, and other relevant experts in the diagnosis and treatment of disease…

How are drugs developed and financed? An overview

I just came across a nice overview article titled The financial ecosystem of pharmaceutical R&D. The white paper was developed for the Netherlands government and provides an overview of the drug development process and how (and by whom) it is financed. The white paper answers the following questions: What do different players do within the…

Why does the UK pay less for medicines?

According to the OECD, In 2021 the U.S. spent $1,432/capita on pharmaceuticals compared to only $517/per capita in the UK. The UK’s figure was slightly higher that Poland and Norway, but less than Latvia, the Slovak Republic, Portugal and Romania. How does the UK spend so little on drugs? Many people focus on the efforts…

Effect of pharmaceutical innovation on longevity

Using data from 2006-2018 across 26 high-income countries, Lichtenberg et al. (2022) measures the relationship between pharmaceutical innovation and longevity. Innovation is measured by “mean vintage…of the drugs used to treat each disease in each country” where vintage is defined as the year of worldwide launch. For the U.S., the authors found that: …the diseases…