Pharmaceutical industry: outlines of an instrustrial policy for the pharmaceutical sector

This communication aimed to outline the industrial policy guidelines to be applied to the pharmaceutical sector in the Community. On the basis of the idea that this industry required a market that was better integrated and where competition was freer, the Commission intended to give priority to the following aspects: - consolidating and progressively updating existing pharmaceutical legislation in a manner that was codified, transparent and easily accessible to health enterprises and professions, and ensuring that Community legislation was fully and correctly transposed by the Member States; - implementing as soon as possible the future system for the authorisation of medicines for human and animal use, particularly by contributing to the establishment of the European Medicines Evaluation Agency, in close cooperation with the competent national authorities and firms concerned; - ensuring and improving the protection of intellectual property for genuinely innovative therapeutic inventions, so as to ensure protection similar to that available in the main rival markets; - creating a more favourable environment for biotechnology through the adaptation of the regulatory framework to the needs of research and current international developments; - promoting the integration and coordination of research and development work in the pharmaceutical sector within the context of the fourth framework programme for R&D; - monitoring the effects on the operation of the internal market of national measures to control prices and reimburse medicines where they were of a discriminatory nature and with the aim of ensuring transparency and exploring the need to adapt Directive 89/105/EEC relating to the transparency of measures regulating the prices of medicinal products for human use and their inclusion in the scope of national health insurance systems, in the light of experience; - increasing competition in the pharmaceutical market, by making it more transparent and by making it possible to encourage competition through prices; - providing health professionals and consumers with sufficient information to promote the rational use of medicines, particularly through the harmonisation of labels and indications for use, and the updating of a computerised database on medicines that would subsequently be available to the public (ECPHIN); - continuing and stepping up harmonisation efforts at global level in order to reduce the costs of research and development in the pharmaceutical sector and facilitate the opening up of external markets to medicines produced in the Community. �