Novartis: drug costs can come down with fewer 'fails'

The average cost of bringing a single drug to market for Novartis was $4bn (£2.4bn), he added, but as much as $1bn of this cost could be money wasted on investigating drugs which failed during development.

Novartis also hopes it can cut the cost of making drugs by using “continuous manufacturing”, a process which allows drugs to be made in smaller quantities.

It is, at present, piloting this approach in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But Dr Wright sounded a note of caution over whether these developments would bring down the final price of cutting-edge drugs, since these medicines will still need large investment.

Instead he said the price cuts would more likely be applied to “generic” drugs in the firm’s portfolio – those whose patent has expired.

“Having a strong generics division being able to offer state-of-the-art molecules to patients at competitive prices provides a nice balance for us,” he said.

“If you think about it from a societal view, it’s when generics have the ability to treat a lot of common diseases and reduction of healthcare cost allows innovative drugs to remain with a premium.”

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