2016 Annual Report - Backgrounder

About the 2016 Annual Report

The Honourable Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Federal Minister of Health, tabled the 2016 Annual Report of the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) with the Clerks of the House of Commons and the Senate on October 26, 2017.
The 2016 Annual Report sets out detailed information on the PMPRB’s regulatory activities; patentees’ compliance with the Board’s pricing guidelines; sales and price trends of patented drugs in Canada, including international price comparisons, trends in all drug expenditures, and spending on pharmaceutical research and development.

1,435 patented drug products for human use were reported to the PMPRB in 2016, including 128 new drug products.
12 Voluntary Compliance Undertakings were accepted as at December 31, 2016.
$5.0 million in excess revenues were offset by way of payment to the Government of Canada, in addition to price reductions.

There were $15.5 billion in sales of patented drug products in Canada in 2016, an increase of 2.6% from 2015.
Patented drug products accounted for 60.8% of the total drug sales in Canada, a decrease from 61.6% in 2015.
Prices of existing patented drug products were stable, while the Consumer Price Index rose by 1.4%.
Canadian prices were fourth highest among the seven PMPRB comparator countries, lower than prices in Switzerland, Germany and the US.
R&D-to-sales ratios remained unchanged in 2016 at 4.4% for all patentees and 4.9% for Innovative Medicines Canada members

The Patented Medicine Prices Review Board is an independent, quasi-judicial administrative agency with a regulatory mandate to protect Canadian consumers from excessively priced patented drugs.
The PMPRB has a dual role:
- Regulatory – To ensure that prices charged by patentees for patented medicines sold in Canada are not excessive;
- Reporting – To report on pharmaceutical trends of all medicines and on R&D spending by pharmaceutical patentees.

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