At Pfizer, finding cures is our first job year on year. We are proud to say that we dedicate our careers to making people healthier. We do that by making the best medicines available for you today and tomorrow as these are the medicines that improve people’s lives.
Every day, thousands of doctors and scientists at Pfizer are trying to find new cures and treatments for people like you. Right now we have more than 200 medicines that we are trying to develop, test and make safe. To see how we discover new medicines please take some time to look through the story of a new medicine.
Scientific Discovery
Thousands of Pfizer researchers are working to discover and develop new cures. They are searching every day for new medicines, looking for the answers to the diseases that trouble us all at a cost of billions of pounds each year.
When searching for cures, we study thousands of chemical compounds, and most of these never become medicines. For every one medicine that gets successfully approved there are 5 to 10 thousand others that don’t make it. When we find one of these compounds that shows some promise it then begins its long journey to being a medicine you can use.
Patent protection
Once we have discovered a compound that might one day become a medicine it has to then earn its “patent”. A patent gives an inventor the right to be the only one to make and sell his or her invention for 20 years in the medical industry.
A patent is given in the early stages of medicine development when it can still be very many years away from being licensed. It takes many years of hard work and research before it can become something useful and spends most of the first half of the patent protection period being tested to see if it is safe and will actually help people.
Testing the new medicine
We need to test all our new medicines to ensure that they are safe and effective and this process can last many years. If results in laboratory show that a medicine has potential then scientists can start work on clinical trials. These tests are carried out on thousands of volunteers under close medical supervision. These tests show how effective the medicine is in improving patients lives and make sure that the medicine is safe. We know every medicine can cause a side effect in people, but these trials will show what effects will occur and ensure they are not too serious.
Only one out of every five medicines that make it to the clinical trials stage will actually be successful. All these five medicines that we test cost millions to develop. On average a new medicine can cost more than £400 million to develop.
Some people ask why we can’t do better than one in five, but it’s not until a medicine is tested in people that we know exactly what it can do. This testing takes money, good medical judgement and a lot of time, around 12 years to be precise!
It’s only now that a medicine can be introduced to the market, but it doesn’t stop there. If a licence is granted and it’s prescribed, the effects of the medicine are continually studied throughout its life to see what is happening in the real world. But the story doesn’t end there…
Development of medicines
Some people ask why we would bring newer medicines to market when there have already been similar ones previously. Why make another blood pressure medicine or another medicine for diabetes? Why not just focus on finding new cures for diseases that have no treatments?
The answer is while we look for new cures, we also need to continue to improve the medicines we have now.
What happens when the patent protection is over?
On average after testing, patents will only last for around eight years of the medicines life. Once the patent is up, other companies can make copies of the medicines known as “generics”. Even though one company created the medicine, it then has to hand over all its research to show that the medicine is safe and effective.
It’s good for us to have companies that invent new medicines as well as those that make copies of older medicines. The inventor companies like Pfizer will keep looking for new medicines to help us all as well as providing generics too.
More on the way
Last year, Pfizer and companies like us spent more than $30 billion worldwide to find new cures and treatments. Over the past five years, all of us added more than 100 new treatments.