By Natalie Grover
LONDON (Reuters) – Surging energy costs in Europe risk accelerating the exodus of companies critical to the manufacture of essential medicines, further endangering drug supply chains hit by shortages at the height of COVID-19, pharmaceutical firm Teva said in a report on Thursday.
Essential medicines are crucial to treating long-term conditions as well as being key to surgical procedures. They are also typically off-patent, sold at the lowest possible prices set by national health agencies or insurers’ associations in European member states.
This pressure on pricing for these key generic medicines has long pushed manufacturing of the most-energy intensive component – active pharmaceutical ingredients – eastwards to India and China, where costs are dramatically lower.
Now, the war in Ukraine and the associated energy and economic crisis threatens to “debase the continent’s pharmaceutical sector for good for some critical medicines,” Teva wrote in its report.
(Reporting by Natalie Grover in London; Editing by William Maclean)
