Global Outlook For Medicines Through 2018

By Murray Aitken, Executive Director of the IMS Institute

As global attention turns to the post-2015 development agenda that will replace the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the role of medicines in supporting the development of healthy societies grows more important. Advances in innovation, efforts to expand access and promote inclusiveness, and new approaches to ensuring the sustainability of healthcare systems will all have a bearing on the use of medicines over the next five years around the world.

In this report we provide an outlook on the use of medicines and spending levels through 2018. We take a global view of the markets for all types of pharmaceuticals, including small and large molecules, brands and generics, those dispensed in retail pharmaceutics as well as those used in hospital or clinic settings. We frame the size of the markets based on pricing information available to us and used to estimate manufacturer sales with a consistent methodology over time. In this report we have also sought to size the magnitude of the impact of various confidential rebates, discounts, taxes or other adjustments that affect the net amounts received by manufacturers.

Over the next five years we expect to see a surge of innovation emerging from the research and development pipeline that will bring clinical benefits to patients not only in developed economies but also in low- and middle-income countries. At the same time, the impact of patent expiries — which has significantly reduced drug spending growth levels across all developed markets in the past five years—will moderate, even with the growing availability of biosimilars. These factors, combined with the expected strengthening of the global economy and rapid expansion of access in emerging markets, will drive higher levels of growth in drug spending over the next five years compared to the past five years. They will also result in medicines playing a more central role in the timely and cost-effective prevention or treatment of disease, helping to bring lower costs to health systems overall even as patient outcomes and satisfaction can improve. We will continue to monitor these developments closely and provide additional insight regularly.