Are You Efficient? Why R&D Process Streamlining Could Affect 140,000 Jobs

By Robert G. Bell

A recent survey and report by PhRMA and Battelle indicates that pharmaceutical executives believe there will be strong growth in R&D and manufacturing but that fewer workers would be needed as “efficiencies” in R&D and manufacturing take hold in the next 10 years.

Pharmaceutical executives were surveyed for their best-case, most likely case, and worst-case views and projections for the future growth probabilities of U.S. and global pharmaceutical industry across R&D and manufacturing activities for the next 10 years. These different potential futures for domestic growth in pharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing activities are dependent on policy choices made in the United States regarding coverage/payment to encourage innovation, regularity systems, and intellectual property. The report’s authors developed a statistically adjusted or normalized distribution of future growth probabilities based on the distribution of these future growth rates and how much, on average, the individual scores varied from the current…