The Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) has published its 2021 Annual Report which outlines the continued increases it has observed in the sale of high-cost medicines in Canada.
Tabled with the Senate and House of Commons on Nov. 18, the report states that sales of patented medicines were $17.4-billion in 2021, driven primarily by the increased use of higher-cost medicines. This total is a 1.7 per cent decrease compared to 2020. Those with annual treatment costs of at least $10,000 accounted for 57 per cent of patented medicine sales in Canada in 2021, while five per cent of total sales can be attributed to just 29 medicines which cost over $100,000 per year.
The report also looks at sales and pricing trends, international price comparisons (Canada represents 2.1 per cent of worldwide sales while Canadian list prices were the third highest among 31 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries), trends in all medicine expenditures and spending on pharmaceutical research and development. Notably in research and development, the average ratio of expenditures to sales revenues was just 3.4 per cent in 2021, a 71 per cent decrease from a peak of 11.7 per cent in 1995.
The PMPRB writes that patented medicines accounted for approximately 51 per cent of all medicine sales in Canada in 2021. “Over the last five years, sales of patented medicines have grown by an average of 2.2 per cent per year,” they state, adding that high-cost medicines in particular account for 57.1 per cent of these sales. “In 2021, the 20 top-selling patented medicines in Canada, which accounted for 40 per cent of total patented medicine sales, had a median treatment cost of $42,616, nearly 60 times the median in 2012.”
