The Norwegian Pharmaceutical Pipeline is growing

For the third year running the Norwegian Bioindustry Association has conducted a survey of The Norwegian Pharmaceutical Pipeline. There has been a growth of companies involved in clinical trials phase I and II, while the same number of companies is managing clinical trials in phase III.

The key findings are:

• A total of 20 companies had a pipeline in 2009 (same as in 2008). There were 15 companies that had ongoing clinical trial(s) (project in phase I-III), while 5 companies only had ongoing pre clinical studies. This report maps both ongoing clinical trial(s) and preclinical studie(s).
  
• There are four new companies in the 2009 survey that did not participate in the last year survey.
  
• It is an increase of 14 projects in pre clinical trial to clinical trial phase III and 12 clinical trials when comparing to the 2008 data. This is mainly due to 11 new studies in clinical phase I.
   
• There has been a growth of companies involved in clinical trials phase I and II, while the same number of companies is managing clinical trials in phase III. There were 5 companies that did not have ongoing clinical studies, but only pre-clinical studies, of which 3 companies did not have studies in late pre clinical trial.
   
• Overall there are more clinical trials per capita in Norway than in Sweden in 2009. Even when excluding the newcomers the difference between Norway and Sweden with respect to number of clinical trials per capita has been significantly improved.
   
• The majority of the projects are developed internally as in 2008. However there are a significant larger proportion of studies in 2009 that are developed in collaboration with industry and academia.
   
• The trend in the Norwegian study is the same as at is seen in the Swedish pipeline3 where there is also a prominent increase in biologics, while chemical molecules are still in majority with 10 more projects in clinical trials (phase I-III).
  
• There is a prominent trend to transfer the manufacturing abroad for both clinical trial production and production of final product compared to last year’s survey.
  
• The majority of the 41 clinical trials are classed as therapeutic. Overall 68 % of the 41 clinical trials mapped by this survey are within the therapeutic category. Cancer is by far the most dominating indication and account 64 % of the clinical trials in this category. There are 20 companies participating in the survey, of which most 90 % have therapeutic projects. Less than 20 % of the companies had diagnostic projects, and only 10 % had drug delivery project. Compared to the Swedish pipeline the Norwegian pipeline is less diverse, and more dominated of cancer related conditions.

• Clinical pipeline report 2009