Issued — Tuesday 20 February 2007, London, UK

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has today raised several important questions on the current approach, taken by the Pharmaceutical Price and Regulation Scheme (PPRS), and its role in the control of NHS expenditure.

GSK is open to dialogue about how to improve patient access to innovative new medicines and how to enhance the system for medicines pricing in the UK. The PPRS has, and continues to, provide a foundation for a stable framework which aims to ensure access to affordable new medicines while encouraging high risk innovative research. In doing so, it has enabled the UK and the industry to adopt a long-term approach to developing new medicines, a critical factor for successful discovery of new treatments. GSK recognises that improvements can be made to the existing scheme, in particular to recognise the expected value new treatments can deliver over existing treatments.

Any changes made to the UK pricing scheme must be practical, allow flexibility and be evolutionary in nature. GSK does not believe that any solution should depend on mechanistic approaches that attempt to crudely categorise medicines based merely on their molecular make-up. These models fail to recognise the very real impact that apparently similar treatments can have on patients in the real world.

In addition, it is imperative that any new approach taken is not to the detriment of future scientific investment and understanding. Significant upfront investment and long-term planning is required for the effective development of new medicines, and the UK must seek to preserve the current successful environment in which this takes place.

Today’s OFT report, like other recent reports, highlights the need to reward and incentivise innovation; and nurture a genuine world-leading UK industry. It is in the interest of both Government and the industry to produce new medicines of value to patients. GSK remains committed to working with the Government to achieve this aim.

GlaxoSmithKline — one of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies — is committed to improving the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer.

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