General characteristics of top 100 selling drugs: Turkish pharmaceutical market between 2003 and 2016

Abstract

There have been many developments that affected the Turkish pharmaceutical market following the Health Transformation Program (2003) and Social Security Reform (2006). The objective of this study was to investigate effects of the developments in Turkish drug market between 2003 and 2006 on the general properties of top selling drugs. Sales figures of all pharmaceuticals between 2003-2016 were obtained from IMS-Health Turkey database. The top 100 pharmaceuticals with the highest sales for each year were included in the study. Pharmaceuticals classified according to their general characteristics (locally manufactured/imported/locally manufactured and imported, brand name/generic, biotech or blood products, ATC groupings). There were 2.593 brands of pharmaceuticals in 2003 and 4.461 in 2016. During the 14 years, total sales of pharmaceutical came up to 21.052.440.931 TRY from 5.487.899.850 TRY. Total sales of the top 100 pharmaceuticals in 2003 approximately was 2.1 billion TRY, and exceeded 6.9 billion TRY in 2016. In this top selling group, dominance of imported and brand name drugs has increased over the years. The total value of biotechnological pharmaceuticals in the top 100 pharmaceutical group increased from 100 million TRY in 2003 to 2.5 billion TRY in 2016. Biotechnological pharmaceuticals are all brand name drugs and imported. Pharmaceuticals in this group have been dominated by antibiotics between 2003-2011, and by oncology drugs for the following years. The result of our study demonstrated the importance of creating new molecules for the long-term, and producing pharmaceuticals with higher value added and more advanced technology in Turkey. [Med-Science 2018; 7(3.000): 684-90]

Keywords

• Health policy
• biotechnological drugs
• Turkish pharmaceutical market