These statements minimize the importance and value of these innovations to individual patients and to cost-effective health care. Each patient is unique and may respond to the same drug differently. What works for one person does not necessarily work for another. Physicians and patients benefit from a variety of medicines available to treat each ailment. Steady, valuable incremental improvements in safety, effectiveness, selectivity and usefulness have produced the vast majority of clinically important medicines introduced in the last 50 years.
Breakthrough drugs are by definition rare, ranging from one to three per year worldwide.
Much of scientific and medical progress is based on incremental improvements to existing products including reduced side effects, greater effectiveness, improved safety, and easier administration. Incremental innovations have substantially reduced health care costs for providers, private and public insurers, individual patients and the public. For example, four new ACE inhibitors were launched in 1991-1992, with an average introductory price 36 percent below the market segment leader. Just this past month, the research-based pharmaceutical industry produced yet another therapeutic advance in the treatment of chronic arthritis. Arthritis patients manage life-long pain with the treatment of pharmaceuticals.