New EGA president promotes value and globalisation
Meeting today in Warsaw, the European Generic medicines Association’s Board announced the election of Gudbjorg Edda Eggertsdottir as its new President. Ms Eggertsdottir has been active in the generic medicines industry for over 30 years, witnessing the many challenges it has already faced on its way to becoming an essential part of the global healthcare offering. She has an impressive industry pedigree, which includes significant experience in the generic medicines sector in companies such as Actavis – where she is currently President Iceland, Strategic Projects – and Delta. Ms Eggertsdottir has been part of the EGA Executive Board for two years.
She fully understands the restrictive conditions in which the generic medicines and biosimilars industries must now operate and the challenges they face in seeking to bring affordable and reliable medicines to the citizens of Europe. These include: more evidence of price cuts and tendering; increased regulation and global competition; and the need to promote an industrial policy to make Europe the centre of generic and biosimilar medicines manufacturing – a goal to which Actavis is committed.
Ms Eggertsdottir wants to increase patient access to these medicines by increasing demand-side measures and encouraging decision-makers to understand that relying solely on price cuts will have serious negative consequences in the longer term. “We need to work with the national governments to promote sustainable pricing systems for our products, and to convince them that the best way forward is to promote demand for our products and to increase generic penetration. An important part of achieving that is to ensure immediate access to the markets post patent expiry, e.g. to ban all forms of patent linkage,” Ms Eggertsdottir said.
She will also help to guide the industry through the challenges of globalisation faced by generic and biosimilar medicines. “If we want to promote the global impact of biosimilars, we must support global development. We cannot live with separate development programmes for Europe, US and Japan – not only is this unethical, it is also simply far too costly,” Ms Eggertsdottir said.
