About Medaxes

Our mission

Medaxes is the Belgian association of pharmaceutical companies that want to contribute to making healthcare accessible to all.

Medaxes focuses on generic and biosimilar medicines, as well as on other off-patent medicines and self-care products.

Medaxes aims to provide high quality solutions for efficient and sustainable healthcare in a well-regulated environment. 

Medaxes strives to build a dialogue and work in partnership with other healthcare stakeholders. For its members, Medaxes acts as a representative platform, offering a wide range of services in support of their individual activities and common interests.

Our values

Medaxes is the voice of pharmaceutical companies seeking to ensure that healthcare is accessible to all patients.

Our members provide cost-effective treatment options for the vast majority of pathologies.

Generic and biosimilar medicines play a key role in this process because they break up monopolies. Upon expiry of the patent on the branded product, they create competition on the medicine market. This leads to substantial price decreases, and as a result, expenditure for both healthcare insurance and patients also significantly drops. But also off-patent branded medicines that reduce their prices, contribute to this. Currently, nearly 70% of the medicines that are being reimbursed by healthcare insurance and sold in Belgian public pharmacies are cheap medicines. This type of price dynamics resulted in a healthcare insurance saving of 1.9 billion euro in 2020. These resources can now be used to make new and often very expensive therapies accessible to patients or to treat more patients who were previously left untreated.

In modern healthcare, the patient more than ever takes centre-stage. In a number of cases, patients themselves can recognise the symptoms of their illness without the need for direct medical advice. By opting for self-care medicines, which are available in pharmacies without a prescription, well informed patients can achieve significant savings in the social cost of being ill. This is also contributing to accessible healthcare, and the reason why Medaxes is focused on a policy that supports this.

Quality

A human being’s health is his greatest asset. Therefore, together with Medicines for Europe and Food Supplements Europe, Medaxes supports the European quality requirements imposed on medicines. There are no compromises here.

Sustainable development

Healthcare must not only be accessible for everyone today, but also tomorrow. This can only be achieved if all stakeholders work together on sustainable development models, with viable prospects for all parties concerned. In the future, even wider cooperation platforms will be needed.

Dialogue and partnerships

Healthcare is extremely complex and its organisation must be constantly adapted to the needs of patients and changes in society. Medaxes is convinced that this can only be done by establishing a genuine dialogue and a partnership between all stakeholders.

Corporate social responsibility

Medaxes stands for affordable medicines and affordable self-care products.

Our members can only realise their social added value if they can be active in a sustainable economic framework, today and tomorrow.

Society rightly expects that, for a pharmaceutical company, the health and interests of the patient are the ultimate touchstone. Pharmaceutical companies must align their internal objectives with the broader interests of public health.

For Medaxes, an entrepreneur must therefore always practice corporate social responsibility.

This means, for example, that medicines and self-care products must meet the highest quality requirements and that the necessary attention is paid to any impact on the environment. In addition, everything must be done to avoid the distribution of counterfeit medicines. This is the reason that Medaxes is a founding member of the Belgian Medicines Verification Organisation (Bemvo).

Auto-regulation & Deontological Charter

In the areas where this is possible, Medaxes and its members also want to take direct responsibility through systems of self-regulation. In becoming a member of Medaxes, companies endorse the deontological charter of the association. This includes a number of provisions regarding the pursuit of the best quality of medicines, respect for intellectual property rights, information about and promotion of medicines, transparency of the relations with healthcare professionals and patients' associations, etc. Businesses or citizens who believe that Medaxes members have violated this charter, may file a complaint. To guarantee an independent procedure, this complaint is dealt with by an external solicitor. In addition, Medaxes is a founding member of Mdeon and betransparent.be.

Self-regulation distinguishes itself by a proximity that controlling authorities can never offer. By the same token, self-regulating systems also face restrictions because they do not have the same amount of privileges that the authorities have. For Medaxes, self-regulation therefore goes hand in hand with an open and transparent cooperation with the authorities.

As part of corporate social responsibility, Medaxes members participate in the take-back of unused and expired medicines* that patients bring back to community pharmacies.

* information available in French and Dutch only