Pharmaceuticals: is there a just price for innovation?

Pharmaceuticals: is there a just price for innovation? The « Sovaldi case », a very effective and very expensive drug targeting a relatively large population, marks an evolution of the «business model» of pharmaceutical innovations. This latter was traditionally split between expensive drugs in narrow indications (targeted treatments, orphan diseases) and drugs addressing a wider population at moderate costs, at least not commensurate with that of contemporary innovations. Even if these prices - resulting in from an undisputable financialization of advanced medical research - raise a legitimate emotion among health care professionals and in the public opinion, even if regulators impose price cuts, at least in Europe, these treatments - that can be «efficient» in a health economic sense - raise serious funding problems. The exacerbation of price competition between similar molecules arriving simultaneously on the market, an unusual phenomenon in the pharmaceuticals markets, the patent fall of the great innovations of the 2000s that impose currently an heavy burden on public funding, and the correlative launch of «biosimilars », and the emergence of new pricing schemes involving the concept of «risk sharing» constitute some structural changes to face the stake of high prices to public health systems.