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New (pharmaceutical) products are getting increasingly more expensive. As a result of this trend accessibility of pharmaceuticals decreases. However, not all innovation can be attributed to private companies. Subsequently, the role of public institutions like universities, university spin-offs, and publicly funded biotech start-ups is largely being disregarded at the price negotiations. Public funding in the form of research grants, tax incentives, utilisation of clinical infrastructure or regulatory measures make a major contribution.

Article 57 of the proposed Pharmaceutical Legislation (PL, Directive) will require market authorization applicants to publicly declare any direct financial support for R&D received from public authorities. The aim of our research (funded by EU Horizon Europe Grant Agreement Number 101095593) is to increase transparency in (pharmaceutical) R&D to mitigate the risk of market failure associated with information asymmetry by analyzing pharmaceutical R&D expenditures of bringing a new medicine to the market and which factors influence these expenditures and to identify the categories needed to capture direct or indirect public contributions to R&D, to provide a framework for standardized reporting of public contributions and to reduce ambiguity in the interpretation of “direct” and “indirect” public contributions.

The report is the first output of the project HI-PRIX (WP2, sub-deliverable 2.2).

Registries are systems for collecting observational data on patients in a database. They can be used by decision-makers to improve healthcare. However, the number and type of existing registries in Austria are unknown. Therefore, the aim of this report was to provide an overview of the Austrian registry landscape and to present the quality and characteristics of selected registries. Furthermore, it was a goal to examine the utilisation of Austrian registries and whether some areas need further development.

Publication: HTA Project Report No. 157: https://eprints.aihta.at/1489/
Contact: Christoph Strohmaier

For children, adolescents and adults with overweight or grade 1 obesity, group programmes are offered which include content on nutrition, exercise and behaviour. However, it is a challenge to reach the respective target groups and to retain the participants in the programme for the entire duration. Based on the reviewed literature, numerous strategies for recruiting target groups and improving programme adherence were identified. In addition, an overview of existing programmes in German-speaking countries was provided.