Big Phar­ma’s woe­ful num­bers on drug R&D just got even worse

The an­a­lysts at De­loitte con­tin­ue to cal­cu­late a dwin­dling re­turn for Big Phar­ma’s R&D dol­lars. Their lat­est num­ber crunch­ing for the world’s top 12 bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies con­cludes that ROI on their in­vest­ment cash has shrunk to 3.7%, the low­est lev­el yet af­ter hit­ting 10.1% in 2010.

What’s killing these com­pa­nies’ num­bers, De­loitte says, is that while de­vel­op­ment costs on new drugs have plateaued at about $1.5 bil­lion on each pro­gram, their rev­enue keeps falling. There’s been an 11.4% drop in rev­enue year-on-year over 6 years, which has now fall­en to $394 mil­lion in av­er­age peak an­nu­al sales.

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