Industry Updates

However, the biopharmaceutical sector is facing a number of serious challenges and the Government's economic, health and education policies will play a major role in ensuring a sustainable industry over the next decade.

For drugmakers, the golden era of the 1990s and early part of the last decade, when they seemed to effortlessly churn out new multibillion-dollar pills for the masses along with double-digit quarterly profit increases, is not even in the rearview mirror any more.

Twenty-two percent of healthcare IT and pharma mergers and acquisitions in 2011 were financed by private equity, venture capital and other investment firms, according to a new report from investment bank Berkery Noyes.

In a strange twist of events, the proposed Clinical Drug Act will not be supervised by the Ministry of Health, but instead by the Ministry of Finance, professionals in the health sector claim.