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Home > Focus On
ITALIAN PHARMACEUTICALS: A SECTOR IMMUNE TO CRISIS
Rome (Ign) - With average growth in turnover of 7.7% and production value of €19bn, the Italian pharmaceuticals industry is strong and in good health, and boasts a solid tradition. There are a dozen large companies and hordes of small and medium-sized businesses ready to make the great leap to the top league of major international companies. And the future looks even rosier, seeing their capacity to survive on the market and anticipate it, by creating research projects with promising development potential.
The pharmaceutical industry arose from science and is indissolubly linked to it. In Italy the sector - considered in crisis in the late 1990s - is more dynamic than ever, and today it accounts for 74 thousand jobs, according to figures published by Farmindustria (the trade association, www.farmindustria.it), with occupational growth now on the rise for 10 years. Between 1995 and 2005, production witnessed growth double that of the Italian economy, with turnover reaching €19bn, 60% of which was realised abroad. Every year confirms the sector's ability to innovate, and last year alone businesses made investments in technological innovation totalling a billion euros, while research and development account for 6400 jobs. It is not difficult to understand the reason: due to its structure, the sector needs a continuous process of innovation as a result both of a highly competitive market and of the continuous arrival of new diseases that require the rapid development of new active principles, or chemical substances with a therapeutic effect. Innovation becomes functional in the phase of drug research and development, but also structural in a competitive market, where internationalisation plays a fundamental role: the 12 leading companies account for 76 plants in Italy and 197 abroad, as well as running 181 research projects in various stages of development throughout the world.
The production facilities in the Italian sector are distributed according to marked geographic bias: Lombardy is the leading region in Italy in terms of number of companies in the chemical-pharmaceutical sector, and the second in Europe; in Emilia Romagna there are more than 3000 jobs, while Veneto accounts for over a quarter of the total jobs in research and industrial development. And the results are evident: today there are 35 Italian drugs on which experimentation is underway, 28 of which are biotech, while there are 52 strategic projects in the health sector, in fields ranging from cancer and degenerative diseases to the biomedical sector. Between 2000 and 2005 in Italy over 3000 clinical experimentation trials were started, 50% of which have reached phase III, in which the drug is tested on a statistically significant sample of patients, and which immediately precedes commercialisation of the product. Oncology, neurology and urology are the three fields that account for over 50% of the projects for new Italian drugs.
Nor should we forget those products and technologies resulting from Italian research, and which in recent years have earned an international reputation: Iopamidol, the most widely used contrast medium, which has revolutionised diagnostic practice in the last 15 years; Modulite technology, which makes it possible to realise aerosol formulations based on HFA environmentally-friendly propellants, without altering bio-availability levels and with excellent formula flexibility; Surfattante, used in life-saving therapies for respiratory conditions in premature babies. This, then, is a strong, mature and highly non-cyclical sector, which continued to develop even when growth in the Italian GDP slowed down. And such performance is usually the best guarantee of quality.
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