In an address Thursday to the American Chamber of Commerce in Germany, John Lechleiter, chief executive officer of Eli Lilly and Company, called for societies to think about healthcare reform in a new way.
Innovation is the key to improving healthcare quality while controlling costs, he said.
Eli Lilly and Company, a pharmaceutical giant founded in 1876 in Indianapolis, now employs more than 40,000 people around the world. The company conducts clinical research in more than 50 countries, has research and development facilities in eight countries and manifacturing plants in 13 countries and markets products in 143 countries.
According to Lechleiter, innovative medicines could further improve people's health, replace more expensive treatments and provide strong economic benefits by generating thousands of research jobs.
Focusing exclusively on the cost of specific treatments, he said, can have the unintended effect of increasing healthcare spending over time.
"New medicines to provide better treatment for the pandemic of diabetes, to alleviate the growing human and economic toll of Alzheimer's disease or to address countless other unmet medical needs around the world could have dramatic positive impacts not only on the quality human life, but also on the capacity of our healthcare systems and the costs they incur," he said.
Lechleiter said advances in science are enabling researchers to move beyond "one-size-fits-all medicines" to tailor therapies to help individual patients.
"From the point of view of patients and their doctors, a tailored therapy will provide a better benefit/risk profile, because they can have a higher degree of confidence that it will work effectively and without harmful side-effects," he said. "And from a value-for-money standpoint, more-tailored therapeutics should also reduce the heavy costs associated with non-responders."
Lechleiter highlighted the economic benefits of pharmaceutical research, which in Germany provides more than 100,000 jobs, generates exports surpassing 40 billion Euros and accounts for more than 10 percent of all research and development investments in the country.
"Innovation is not a panacea for the challenges facing our healthcare systems, but it is hard to see any way out of the current crisis – and I don't think that's too strong a word – without innovation," he said. "Indeed, innovation needs to be the purpose of healthcare reforms in both the United States and Germany."