Evaluating Social Pharmaceutical Innovation as a Means of Reducing High Therapeutic Costs

The current state of pharmaceutical industry operations is unsustainable for both companies and patients. Medication prices are getting exponentially more expensive while returns on R&D are nearing closer and closer to zero, especially in the case of rare disease therapies. The rigidity of the innovation pipeline has continued to drive these costs up. In fact, these therapies can cost over $100,000 per patient per year. It is apparent that there is a critical need to find a new way to balance the needs of pharmaceutical industry stakeholders, regulatory agencies, and patients. Maintaining the economic incentives for innovation and the development of these rare disease treatments while simultaneously ensuring these life-saving drugs are not financially inaccessible to their intended market. Thus, in this STS research I evaluated the prospect of adopting social pharmaceutical innovation (SPIN) as a mode of reframing the prevailing innovation pathways and overall disrupting the pharmaceutical industry. Of the methods investigated through my research, I found that emphasizing collaboration and harmonization between pharmaceutical firms as well as with regulatory bodies, prize fund models, compulsory licensing, and value-based pricing are methods that show the greatest, immediate promise in improving transparency in the development process and balancing innovation incentives with decreasing the high drug costs patients face. To then prove these strategies effectiveness, I proposed that these companies regularly conduct patient surveys to gather data on how mortality rates, life expectancy, quality of life, and patient reported outcomes (PROs) have been affected as a result of SPIN. I further elaborate that this data can also be used to calculate quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) to empirically demonstrate the economic impact of SPIN. Ultimately, this deviation from traditional practices will incentivize the creation of safe, efficient, and accessible therapies, ultimately catering to unmet needs of rare disease patients and prioritizing social impact over market-driven motives.

School of Engineering and Applied Science

Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering

STS Advisor: Gerard Fitzgerald