Today the Washington Post published an article titled ‘No, Big Pharma’s high prices don’t drive innovation’. 

The published Opinion Piece offers interesting insights run counter to the prevailing idea that innovation is primarily driven by big pharma. The facts speak for themselves: ‘smaller pharmaceutical startups are the real drivers of drug development’. 

“When it comes to pharmaceutical innovation, smaller is better”, say the President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Avik Roy; and Gregg Girvan, a resident fellow at FREOPP. 

According to the authors of a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post, “The days of big companies treating emerging start-ups like their farm team, buying off their best drugs, raising their prices and reaping the profits are beginning to change”.

In the article by Roy and Girvan in the Washington Post on April 4th 2024 – entitled ‘Smaller Pharmaceutical startups are the real driver of drug development’ – they point out that emerging companies are increasingly taking their best drugs to market by themselves. Whereas only 23 percent of successful drugs developed by emerging companies reached FDA approval under the original developer in 2013; by 2022 that share increased to 75 percent.

“If this trend continues, patients will benefit from a more competitive and diverse ecosystem of drug developers”, say the authors.

“At Alloplex we concur. This data should encourage investors to be more confident when considering backing de-risked cellular therapy technologies like SUPLEXA and the ENLIST cell-training platform by Alloplex Biotherapeutics,” says Alloplex’s Founder & CEO, Dr. Borriello.