GSK looks to gov. agencies for R&D advice

GlaxoSmithKline's newly appointed CEO Andrew Witty has seen the future of drug development, and government healthcare systems will play an even bigger role in it. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Witty says that the pharma giant will give government agencies around the world--which pay the lion's share of the drug tab--a bigger voice in deciding which new therapies are advanced in the pipeline. As biopharma giants struggle to win approval for a new generation of therapies at enormous cost, they're showing a rising desire to get regulators' input on their development programs at an earlier stage. Novartis, for example, altered a late-stage trial of an experimental medication to give British regulators more data on cost efficiency. And Glaxo shows every sign of following the same essential path.

"I'm going to deal with the pharmaceutical realities of the next 10 years, and they're very different from those of the 1990s," Witty told the WSJ.

- check out the Wall Street Journal article

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