Our Pharmaceutical Innovation Index has a long history of ranking companies for their ability to bring products from Phase I/II to market and commercialize them successfully, and utilizes a range of clinical, regulatory and commercial metrics to do this, ranging from the corporate level down to individual products. However, there's a challenge - the lay understanding of innovation seems to lead to dissonance. We have been asked, for example, how Gilead could have come top in 2019. Well, when you look at how remarkable a few years they have had in adding value to their pipeline (whether or not they acquired it), it is simple. The question those people are really asking, of course, is: 'is Gilead inventive?'

So, we have gone one step further, and developed a new, ordinal ranking of invention. The Pharmaceutical Invention Index consists of four key metrics: the proportion of pipeline to marketed drugs, the number of trials investigating novel agents, the proportion of 'novel' regulatory designations, and an assessment of the companies' R&D investments. Data are used to objectively evaluate each company and produce an independent category score for each of the top 30 companies. These scores are used to calculate an overall company score and provide an ordinal ranking. (The 'ordinal' bit is important - it simply says who is better than who - it is not a cardinal ranking, so you can't easily extrapolate to pipeline value, for example. It is also somewhat relative - larger companies tend to have larger pipelines, but we've looked for proportional values, too.)

Here is how the two indices stack up: look left to right to see who's more inventive, and from bottom to top to see who's more innovative. Some companies rank highly in both, some only in one index... (For the purposes of the chart, companies have been given a ranking of 31 on Innovation if they weren't included in that index, because of size.)

AstraZeneca landed at top spot in the rankings, scoring exceptionally well across all four metrics. AstraZeneca boasted a high proportion of pipeline to marketed drugs, a large number of trials investigating novel drugs, a good proportion of 'novel' regulatory designations, and a healthy R&D investment track record, as well as a commitment to incremental systematic improvements.

The chart shows how companies differ - those with pipelines full of novelty, but who've been less able to get that novelty over the line, and to patients. And, of course, those who've proven they can add value, but who are looking at less well-stocked portfolios.

This distinction is critical - companies are often evaluated simply for what they have in development, as if that somehow magically translates into on-market performance (or even into approvals), whereas even the most basic observation shows that the question that started the Pharmaceutical Innovation Index ('if you gave the same molecule to two different companies at the end of phase I, would they be equally successful?') has played out with ever-greater differences (for example, the Opdivo/ Keytruda development and marketing) year by year.

We believe it is important to have both: processes that lead to pipeline strength may, in some cases, be at odds with successful launch and market access.

See this years index