The U.S. has a new most reputable pharma company: Horizon Therapeutics. In a survey (PDF) of U.S. patient groups, Horizon was the only company to keep its position in the top three, with Roche and Servier rising to displace ViiV Healthcare and Pfizer from the other two spots on the leaderboard.
As it has done for more than a decade, PatientView created the ranking by collecting the views of patient groups in the U.S., on this occasion by surveying 361 organizations from late 2022 to early 2023.
Horizon had the best overall corporate reputation among the respondents, rising one place from 2021 in what could be its final year as an independent company. Amgen is set to buy Horizon for $28.3 billion.
Limiting the analysis to patient groups that work with the companies changed the leaderboard slightly, with Vertex taking the No. 2 spot and pushing Servier out of the top three. The finding reflects a shift in the perception of Vertex, which was one of the biggest risers, both among patient groups that are familiar with it and those that work directly with the Big Biotech. Bayer was another big riser.
Horizon held the No. 1 spot on both lists, though. According to Horizon, the patient groups that work with it put it in the top spot across 11 of the 14 indicators tracked by PatientView. The company topped the rankings for the indicators acting with integrity, employing a strong patient-centric approach, providing high-quality information for patients and ensuring that more patients get access to medicines.
Future editions of the PatientView survey will show whether Amgen can preserve the culture that has made Horizon a favorite with patient groups. Amgen was covered by the latest survey but is absent from the top-line results, neither featuring on the list of the biggest risers nor any of the top threes released by PatientView. Amgen was the fastest riser among groups familiar with the biotech in the previous survey.
The latest survey also offers a look at the extent to which pharma has preserved the halo that emerged as companies worked to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control. From 2018 to 2021, the proportion of patient groups that ranked the corporate reputation of the pharma industry as “good” or “excellent” rose from 44% to 67%. The figure slipped slightly to 65% in the latest survey.