Illness Never Sleeps

Illness never sleeps. That’s why innovation can never stop.

At Lilly, innovation is the heart of our business, the soul of our enterprise. We are working hard on more than 50 new medicines that could transform the lives of patients, many in disease areas that are too often neglected. Ensuring these breakthroughs are available and affordable for patients is our top priority.

It’s a mission we share with many other biopharmaceutical companies. So we’ve joined a global campaign called #WeWontRest, led by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).

Together as an industry, we push on the frontiers of medical science. Patients need breakthroughs to treat cancer and diabetes. Society needs major discoveries to treat Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune disorders and chronic pain.

There are no guarantees in this business. Lilly has invested $3 billion over 30 years to develop a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s. We haven’t yet won that battle, but we’re committed to keep fighting. We continue investing and learning, despite the perils.

The promise of innovation drives us forward. So do the patients we serve.

Patients and their loved ones inspire us to go faster. The small business owner who lost everything due to unyielding pain. The generation of children growing up with the lifetime challenge of managing diabetes.

Patients like Lale?a Janke, a 22-year-old college student who has suffered from migraines since she was 14. Lale?a tried lots of treatments—they either didn’t work, didn’t last, or gave her bad side effects. She resorted to holding her head underwater in an ice cold bath for as long as she could—just to be free of the pain caused by everyday noises.

Finally, she enrolled in a Lilly clinical trial for a migraine medicine, and that’s when things started to get better. She’s now studying to be a pharmaceutical researcher—to do the same for other people.

At Lilly, we’ll continue to innovate for all these patients.

But we also need the right conditions to make these high-risk, long-term investments.

The path from initial research to new medicines is complicated and full of failure. We will continue to innovate and invest in places—like Japan, Europe and the U.S.—that recognize and encourage biopharmaceutical innovation.

Strong intellectual property protection is essential to us. It is the lifeblood of our industry. It allows us to invest 25 percent of our revenue into R&D, knowing that when we do bring products to market, they are protected for a limited period of time.

When exclusivity expires, we essentially give our inventions away, which makes low-cost generic medicines possible. Then we at Lilly look for new medicines to develop, sustaining the virtuous cycle of innovation.

There are still far too many people with unmet needs, suffering from some of the world’s most debilitating diseases, waiting desperately for new treatments. That’s why we won’t rest.