Biopharmaceutical Research Sector is Global Leader in Innovation

America’s biopharmaceutical research sector is the global leader in medical innovation, with more than 300 new medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the last decade. PhRMA companies are leading the way in the search for new cures. PhRMA members alone invested an estimated $49.5 billion in 2011 in discovering and developing new medicines.

The industry has made tremendous gains in the battle against major chronic diseases like HIV/AIDS, once considered a death sentence but now seen as a controllable disease in the United States. Death rates from cancers also have declined steadily, in large part because of new medicines, and biopharmaceutical R&D has led to breakthroughs in treating rare diseases.

This significant commitment to R&D benefits patients but also helps control overall healthcare costs. According to a recent study, annual costs for diabetes care can be up to 48 percent lower for patients who take their diabetes medicines properly.

The impact from the biopharmaceutical sector is evident not only in treatment savings but also in economic activity. Companies in the sector provided more than 674,000 direct jobs in 2009 (the most recent year of available data) and supported a total of 4 million throughout the economy.

Biopharmaceutical companies invest more than 10 times the amount of R&D per employee than all manufacturing industries overall.