European Pharmaceutical Investment Losing Ground, Nine Chairs Warn

The chairs of nine of Europe’s largest drugmakers have published a joint open letter warning that European pharmaceutical investment is losing ground to the United States and China. Released on 22 September 2026, the letter is signed by the chairs of AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Chiesi Group, Ipsen, GSK, Novo Nordisk, Novartis, Roche and Sanofi. Its message is direct: unless governments change course, the region’s next generation of medicines will be developed elsewhere.

The signatories describe themselves as “proud Europeans” whose companies were born from European science, with laboratories across Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. They point to the pharmaceutical sector as one of the continent’s great post-war achievements, supporting millions of highly skilled jobs and generating an EU trade surplus of more than €220 billion.

Why European pharmaceutical investment is declining

The chairs say they see Europe losing ground from their own boardrooms, pointing to more than $600 billion in pharmaceutical investment announced in the US and China over the past two years alone.

The figures in the letter are stark. Europe accounted for 43% of global pharmaceutical R&D in 1990; today the share is 31% and falling. The region’s share of commercial clinical trials has halved in a decade, to 9%. China has overtaken Europe in clinical trials, pharmaceutical patents and the development of new medicines. The letter quotes Mario Draghi’s warning that strategic sectors such as pharmaceuticals face a “slow agony” of decline without urgent action.

What the decline means for patients

The chairs put the consequences in clinical terms. Around 40% of newly approved therapies never reach European patients, they write, and among those that do, patients wait nearly 600 days for treatment. Cancer survival in Europe trails the United States, a gap the letter attributes in part to late diagnosis and treatment that falls short of the standard recommended by medical guidelines.

This, the letter says, is the result of decades in which Europe treated medicines as a cost to suppress rather than one of the best investments a government can make. It describes outdated systems that constrain the use of innovative medicines, arbitrarily cap budgets and fail to adjust spending for inflation even as patient need rises.

The economics the chairs want recognised

The letter sets out the risk inherent in European pharmaceutical investment. A single innovative medicine takes more than a decade and around €3 billion of at-risk investment before reaching a patient, with only one or two medicines emerging from every 10,000 candidates synthesised in laboratories. Few sectors, the chairs argue, face comparable risk over such long horizons, and the commitment requires a market that rewards it. On the return side, uptake of innovative medicines returns almost sixfold to the economy through lower hospitalisation costs and healthier working lives.

What the chairs are asking for

The letter splits the remedy between Brussels and national capitals. At EU level it calls for faster clinical trials, stronger intellectual property protection and sensible digital policy, plus fiscal flexibility for member states that invest in health and innovative medicines. The decisive levers, it insists, sit with national governments: how much they invest in health budgets, how quickly new medicines are assessed and funded, and how they modernise healthcare to prevent, detect and treat disease.

It asks leaders to treat modern medicines as vital infrastructure, in the same way as defence or energy, and to secure health sovereignty rather than leaving supply to others. It also wants value frameworks modernised so they reflect the total value of treatments to patients, health systems and the economy.

The opportunity at stake

The letter closes on the prize for acting. In clinical trials alone, it says, Europe could unlock €53 billion and 82,000 jobs by closing the gap with China and the US. “If we fail to act with ambition, our future will be built elsewhere,” the chairs write.

The full list of signatories is Michel Demaré (AstraZeneca), Hubertus von Baumbach (Boehringer Ingelheim), Maria Paola Chiesi (Chiesi Group), Marc de Garidel (Ipsen), Sir Jonathan Symonds (GSK), Lars Rebien Sørensen (Novo Nordisk), Giovanni Caforio (Novartis), Dr Severin Schwan (Roche) and Frédéric Oudéa (Sanofi).

Source: Novartis, “Europe Is Losing the Pharma Investment Race”