There is controversy around just how costly is the research and development (R&D) entailed in bringing new medicines or vaccines (hereafter collectively referred to as ‘medicines’) to market. Calls for greater transparency around those costs are heard from policymakers internationally, notably (by implication) in the 2019 World Health Assembly’s (WHA) resolution WHA72.8 on ‘Improving the transparency of markets for medicines, vaccines, and other health products’[1] and (explicitly) in the European Commission’s (EC) 2020 ‘Pharmaceutical strategy for Europe’[2] and the US Congress’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022[3].

This report presents a literature review undertaken in the autumn of 2022 to discover what that literature says about: 

How far and by what methods it is possible to identify, and hence be transparent about, the R&D costs of a new medicine.

What the implications would be, were greater transparency of R&D costs of individual medicines to be achieved, including implications for medicine pricing and innovation.