On Dec. 16 the Commission published its Biotech Act and Safe Hearts Plan, which landed just days after a long-awaited update of the pharmaceutical legislation. Taken together, they seek to incentivize industries to innovate and do business in Europe, improve access to medicines, and tackle the burden of cardiovascular disease.
The pharma industry broadly celebrated the biotech proposal.
The Biotech Act “reflects priorities we’ve intensively advocated to keep Europe globally competitive in life sciences,” Ognjenka Manojlovic, head of policy at European pharmaceutical company Sanofi, told POLITICO. That includes accelerating clinical trials, boosting intellectual property, and strengthening financing for Europe’s biotech ecosystem, Manojlovic said.
The pharmaceutical sector had pushed for longer monopoly rights in the pharma legislation. In the end they were kept at the current standard eight years — instead of being cut by two years as the European Commission had initially proposed.
For Europe’s public health insurers, who pay for drugs, the decisions taken to maintain and then extend market protections for medicines are hard to square.
“We are puzzled by the Commission’s intentions,” said Yannis Natsis, director of the European Social Insurance Platform, a network of Europe’s social insurance organizations, warning that taxpayers will have to pick up the bill.