He also holds an NHMRC Program Grant. JW is the Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Population Salt Reduction at the George Institute. PKM is an Intermediate Career Fellow of the WT/DBT India Alliance. Ethics approval: Human Research Ethics Committees of the University of Sydney and the Centre for Chronic
Disease PI3K signaling pathway Control in New Delhi, and also by the Indian Health Ministry’s Screening Committee. Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Innovative new drugs offer potential benefits to patients, healthcare systems, governments and the pharmaceutical industry.1 However, during the first decade of the new millennium, many commentators noted an apparent temporary lack of pharmaceutical innovation and a reduction in new drug launches, despite increasing research and development (R&D) spending,2–5 though some attributed this to reduced numbers of rapidly developed ‘me-too’ or ‘follow-on’ versions of small molecule high volume drugs.6 Within the context of drug development, innovation is generally defined as the discovery, development and bringing to the market of a new chemical entity7 (NCE); “an active ingredient
that has never been marketed…in any form,”8 and the most straightforward way to measure innovation is to separate drugs into ‘first in class’ and ‘follow-on’ drugs, those which largely duplicate the action of existing drugs and are chemically similar.9 Ferner et al10 have proposed a more sophisticated classification, which identifies a range of features related to a drug’s molecular structure, synthesis, pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics,
delivery, pharmacogenetics and application. However, this does not account for all possible aspects of innovativeness, in particular therapeutic advantage over existing drugs. In considering how the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) should incorporate innovation into UK decision-making, Kennedy proposed that an innovative medicine should offer improvements over existing therapies and a “step-change in terms of outcomes for patients.”11 Building on these approaches, Aronson et al1 defined innovation using a broad perspective, including health and non-health elements, that incorporates both clinical usefulness (offering a therapeutic advantage) and the process through which an innovation arises (ie, through a revolutionary or disruptive transformation AV-951 and incorporating an assessment of pharmaceutical novelty). In this approach, a new drug for a condition that is inadequately treated using current approaches is considered the most clinically useful and the process through which it is developed may be considered ‘highly innovative’ if it utilises “a new target or novel mechanism,” involves “improved identification of patients…likely to benefit or be harmed” and/or uses the “novel application of an existing compound.