The food and drug administration approved 48 new drugs in the last year of this decade 2019. Out of which 19 are biologics & others, whereas 29 small molecules. In 2018, the number of approvals were highest in this decade i.e, from 2009 to 2019. 2010 was the year with less number of approvals. Especially talking about the approvals in 2019, we have 8-10-5-6 drugs for oncology-Neuro-Infections-others. Even though the highest number of deaths was due to cardiovascular diseases there are only few drugs related to it due to the complexity of this area. Highest number of approvals are for neurological disorders followed by oncology and infectious diseases.
Startups and universities are contributing a lot to the discovery along with the big pharma. Once proof of concept established by startups and universities, the data generated was acquired by big pharma thus accelerating the discovery pipeline. With the adoption of Artificial intelligence in drug discovery there may be an increased wave of drugs in the near future. There were about 200 startups using artificial intelligence in drug discovery. The increased funding in this area is encouraging innovators to come up with novel strategies to identify new drugs.
