Now that summer is in full swing, the stakes for Connecticut’s biopharma industry couldn’t be greater. At the state level, the 2009 General Assembly session has come and gone and we still lack a state budget.

Nationally, healthcare is front and center. After many false starts, it looks like we will stitch together some form of universal coverage by late fall. How each of these issues is resolved — and how the details are crafted — has the potential to make or break our industry.

Our state faces a nearly $9 billion deficit. Many proposals have been floated to close this gap, including elimination of some or all of Connecticut’s incentives for biopharma research and development. Suffice it to say, CURE’s working in every way possible to make clear how tremendously counterproductive such proposals are. 

The cost and time it takes to bring a biopharma medicine or device to patients — 15 years and $1.4 billion — dwarf that of other industries. And Connecticut’s attributes — quality of life, research universities, proximity to Manhattan and Boston-Cambridge — go only so far. Connecticut is a high cost place to do business and the existing biopharma tax incentives are what keep us competitive. 

Connecticut policy makers should be mindful that eliminating or diluting these critical tax incentives will have dramatic long-term effects. Laboratories cannot be uprooted instantly, but harmful policy changes like those threatened against biopharma research and development will cause a cascade of seemingly modest decisions — new research projects begun elsewhere, expansion and renovation tabled, new employees not hired — that, over time, will destroy the industry the state has worked so hard to build and which is so important to its citizens’ future prosperity.

In Washington, our challenge is to educate lawmakers that any "reform" that controls biopharma pricing will undermine the industry’s growth and will actually make it more difficult to bring healthcare costs down long-term. The cost of researching and developing a medicine into an FDA-approved product is what it is. The investors who fund that R&D must have confidence about their ability to recoup their investments. If they’re uncertain about their companies’ ability to price medicines they won’t invest. It's as simple as that.

The pressure some legislators are applying to force biopharma prices lower is profoundly misguided (if the purpose is to lower overall U.S. healthcare costs). Biopharma research and development and its new treatments and cures are the way out, not the cause, of the healthcare cost crisis.

As expensive as some medicines may seem for the short period they are patent protected, study upon study has shown biopharma medicines reduce the cost of healthcare delivery. The cost of statin drugs, for example, which reduce cholesterol, is far less than the surgeries, stroke rehabilitation care, etc., that these medicines make unnecessary.

And consider the vast baby boomer population as it approaches the "Alzheimer’s years." Without new medicines to treat this long and debilitating disease, the only alternative will be a massive nursing care facility building program and the recruitment and training of legions of Alzheimer’s healthcare workers. Funding the latter building/training strategy is far more costly than paying for new biopharma medicines. 

If living in interesting times is a blessing, then we are truly blessed.


Paul R. Pescatello is President and CEO of CURE.