Last summer, after writing a profile of Bernard Munos, who has made it his calling to understand what goes into pharmaceutical innovation, I posted two very simple tables based on Munos’ data: of the drug companies that had approved the most drugs over the past decade, and over the past sixty years. I argued at the time (and still feel) that this is a pretty good surrogate for how good these companies were at being pharmaceutical firms — because a drug company’s main job is to invent new medicines and get them to patients.
