Keynote Address
The American Legislative Exchange Council Annual Meeting
Philadelphia, PA
July 25, 2007

America’s pharmaceutical research companies exist for one purpose only: helping patients live longer, healthier lives.

The over 450,000 men and women who work for one of America’s pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical research companies go to work every morning with that goal. Everything they do is focused on creating great medicines that help prevent, cure or treat disease and getting those medicines to patients who need them.

In short, the pharmaceutical research industry is an industry fueled by a powerful idea: what we make can, and does make life better and can even save lives.

However, this is not a quick or inexpensive proposition.

Under the best circumstances, it can take 10 to 12 years and cost as much as a billion dollars to bring a new drug from the laboratory to the pharmacy shelves.

For every 10,000 compounds investigated, maybe one new drug will make it all the way to approval.

Just as the compounds we investigate today – those scientific choices – may determine what disease we are better able to treat in 10 years, the political and economic choices we make today can, and will, determine whether an industry like America’s pharmaceutical research companies can continue creating new and innovative medicines and healthcare technologies.

We are at a critical juncture. New science and technologies are creating vast new potential for new and better treatments. The promise of the pharmaceutical research pipeline – over 2,000 new medicines now in some stage of a clinical trial – means that many patient’s who hoped for a new or better treatment for their disease may soon have that hope answered.

At PhRMA and at America’s research pharmaceutical companies, we are meeting the challenges we face, driven by a guiding ideal: put the needs of patients first.

That means view all issues – scientific, economic, political – through the lens of doing what is best for patients. It is a lens that all healthcare policy should be viewed.

Patient first healthcare means policies that:

• Inspire and rewards the creation of new and better medical technologies and medicines;
• facilitate every patient being treated as an individual and receiving the health care they need;
• make sure patients have access to doctors that are focused on treating the patient’s individual needs and;
• that provide patients and their doctors have access to as wide a range of medical and medicine choices as possible
  

Looking to the future in this country, we face some real healthcare challenges. These include:

• Millions of Americans who can’t get or can’t afford health insurance.
• The cost to the nation of avoidable or treatable chronic diseases-diabetes, obesity, heart disease – today and in the future continues to spiral.
• The growing health needs of millions of retiring baby boomers.
  

But these challenges -- like every healthcare challenge – must be solved in a way that puts the needs of patients first through free market rather than government-imposed and directed solutions.

The solutions that work best for patients, the solutions that are best for those suffering from a disease and who hope for new medicines isn’t to restrict access to medicines, lengthen waiting times, put bureaucrats in the consulting room with patients and doctors, or to merely duplicate the best practices from elsewhere or reduce research & development.

The solutions that work best for patients in both the long and short-terms are those that improve access to medicines and healthcare, create more choices and create an economic, policy and political environment that inspires and rewards research, development and innovation.

In short, market-based, free enterprise solutions.

The power of information.

Patients and their doctors deserve more and the best information about medicines, innovative treatments and practices. To restrict marketing, to limit the information that we can make available to patients and doctors is to disarm patients and take away from them choices and options.

As we look for health care solutions, we should look for solutions that help provide patients and doctors with timely and accurate information – not solutions that restrict information.

Slowing the rising costs of healthcare.

Helping people to stay healthy and helping to prevent disease – such as chronic diseases – is less expensive than hospitalizations, surgeries and long-term health care. And, medicines that help prevent or treat disease can be less expensive than more costly health care services.

As we seek health care solutions to slow and reduce the cost of health care, we should seek solutions that promote and reward disease prevention and that rely on the most effective treatments – whatever they may be.

Creating new medicines and cures.

In each case, a research pharmaceutical company made a calculated decision to invest in a promising therapy – they risked that investment without knowing whether that investment would pay off.

They made that investment because they exist to help patients, but they also made that investment because of the promise of return on that investment.

As we seek health care solutions, we must measure all proposals by how they inspire and reward innovation and new research and development.

Proposals that undermine intellectual property rights, that further reduce the period of time that innovators and pioneers have to make-back and profit from their investment, and solutions that further complicate, bureaucratize and slow the approval process are not solutions that work for patients.

There are over 450,000 men and women in this country – in all 50 states – who today work for one of America’s biopharmaceutical companies. Every one of those job – and they are expanding – represents additional jobs in support industries, service industries, education, and housing and on and on.

In addition, America’s pharmaceutical research companies that belong to PhRMA directly invested over $39 billion in new research and development last year, and when you add in all private development, the number is over $55 billion.

That is investments in people, new facilities, and the latest technologies.

It is an investment that will inspire even more investment and new research and development that can fuel and create new industries and world-leading technologies. And, it is an investment that is nearly double the entire investment of the Federal government in basic research – and that includes all administrative costs.

American patients, in the end, could pay a stiff price if the health care solutions we pursue in Washington and in state capitols undercuts research and development incentives or imposes government-price controls or other restrictive policies on our health care system.

Today there are over 2,000 new medicines now in the later stages of clinical trials and the approval process. Some will be breakthrough therapies that dramatically change and improve how we treat a condition. Some will be incremental improvement that helps patients and moves our understanding of a disease and its treatment slightly forward. And, some will not make it to the pharmacy – after tens-of-thousands of man-hours and hundreds of millions of dollars invested.

But the promise that these medicines in development have for patients is what stands out:

• 650 for the treatment of cancer;
• 300 for various rare disease;
• 197 for treating mental illness;
• 185 for treating infectious diseases;
• 146 for treating heart disease and stroke; and
• 77 for HIV/AIDS
  

Market based solutions to the challenges we face are the best way to help patients have access to the health care they need. It is a fight to make sure that patients have access to the medicines they need; and that they have real health care choices.