Innovation in the healthcare sector is incremental

Small incremental steps - rather than sudden large jumps through breakthrough discoveries - usually underlie progress in technology. Medicine innovation is mostly a gradual step-by-step process too. Many new medicines are improvements of existing medicines. They treat diseases in new and better ways, are easier or safer to use or have fewer side effects. Although molecularly similar, their therapeutic properties are often substantially different. They constitute alternatives enabling the doctor to treat with greater precision the specific and diverse needs of individual patients.

New medicines can bring benefits in many different forms:

• A new medicine may be more effective in improving a medical condition. It can improve patient compliance through better dosage and forms of administration. It can have fewer side effects.
  
  
• Extending the indications of an existing medicine can also represent a significant innovation. Having multiple options within the same therapeutic class allows to take into account differing patient responses to similar medicines.
  
  
• A broad range of medicines provides doctors with a “tool chest” to treat each patient with precision and provides options when particular agents are ineffective or poorly tolerated by a given patient.
  
  
• Product alternatives permit treatments to be better tailored to individual patient needs, since not every patient responds to every drug in the same manner.
  
  
• Moreover, new, incremental innovations are often less expensive than existing agents in a same therapeutic category. The results in terms of efficiency, patient responsiveness, reduced side effects, add up to one outcome: better value for money.