Liikanen calls for innovation in pharmaceutical industry
Further innovation is required in the pharmaceutical industry if Europe's firms are to close the competitiveness gap with the USA, Erkki Liikanen, Commissioner for Enterprise and information society told key stakeholders from the sector in Brussels on 11 December. One of the areas discussed at the meeting was the need for more interaction between academia and industry in Europe. 'Society wants and needs a steady flow of innovative medicines, and if the reward for innovation can be properly targeted it is very substantial...but governments and the Commission have a responsibility also to patients and there is a delicate balance to be struck,' said Mr Liikanen. The meeting came following the publication of a report written by experts on the sector at the request of the Commission, 'Global competitiveness in pharmaceuticals, a European perspective', which gave some critical analysis of the gap between Europe and the USA in terms of international strength of their pharmaceutical firms. 'As a whole Europe is lagging behind in its ability to generate, organise and sustain innovation processes that are increasingly expensive and organisationally complex,' reads the report. 'One notable difference between Europe and the US in the 1990s is that while the US have continued the development of a new research-intensive industry in the life sciences, Europe has been unable to complete the process of vertical specialisation in the most innovative areas of the drug sector.'