Drug firms urged to alter strategies

The world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline, must change their business models to tap a global market that will expand to $1.3 trillion by 2020, a report said.

The industry’s strategy of developing so-called blockbuster medicines costs too much and produces too little, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The largest companies must stop searching for the wonder drug that will sell more than $1 billion a year and focus on drugs with lower sales, the report said.

“Its core problem is lack of innovation in making effective new therapies for the world’s unmet medical needs,” the consulting firm wrote of the industry.