Patient groups’ perceptions of drugmakers with large U.S. footprints have shifted in the past year as the businesses have contended with political pressures, PatientView said.
The findings come from PatientView’s annual survey of more than 2,000 patient groups worldwide. The research company found that patient groups “markedly shifted their perceptions of the corporate reputation of many individual pharma companies.” Such big year-on-year shifts are rare, PatientView said, and the feedback suggests “radical changes in market circumstances are largely responsible for the divergence.”
Volatility in the ranking of drugmakers’ reputations centered on businesses with large U.S. footprints. Changes were “driven primarily by the market, and by political pressures that affect pharma companies,” the research company said. PatientView named U.S. political interventions, the patent cliff and product setbacks as pressures that affected drugmakers in the past year.
The pressures “contributed to retrenchment and workforce reductions,” PatientView said. Patient groups have been affected by the changes. Work with patient groups is “the first thing to go when [drugmakers] worry about their income,” the representative of a national brain cancer patient group told PatientView. The representative of another patient group said business interests get in the way of patient-centricity.
European drugmakers were the main beneficiaries of volatility in the U.S. Seven of the 11 companies that rose the most places up the rankings were European. Only three U.S. companies—Merck & Co., PTC Therapeutics and BioMarin—were among the companies that leaped up the league table. Japan’s Takeda was the other company that climbed the rankings.
GSK was the fastest riser, climbing 10 places, followed by AstraZeneca and Sanofi. AstraZeneca’s rise took it to third on the reputation rankings, knocking Gilead Sciences off the podium. ViiV Healthcare and Roche took the first and second positions, respectively, as they did in the previous survey.
Overall, 57% of respondents said pharma has a good or excellent reputation. The result is the first uptick in the industry’s standing since 2022, when 60% of respondents rated the industry as good or excellent. The figure has held steady between 56% to 60% over the past five years.