Solving unfair access to medicines: good intentions don’t guarantee good results

 
The process of bringing a medicine to market is complex, demanding, and delicate. My colleagues and I were reminded of this in 2021, when AbbVie attempted to launch an innovative blood cancer medicine across the EU.

Thibault Massart is the Vice President Europe South at AbbVie.

According to the WHO, around 320,000 Europeans were diagnosed with blood cancer in 2020 alone. But following regulatory approval of our medicine, while some countries wished to press ahead and launch, others preferred to wait for more trial data. This inconsistency thwarted any possibility of a simultaneous launch throughout Europe, denying patients access in some countries.

This is not an isolated case. There are huge disparities in the time it takes for medicines to become available across different EU countries – data from last year shows that the average  time between market authorisation and availability to patients ranges from 133 days in Germany to 899 days in Romania. (...)