Abstract
There has been disagreement among academicians regarding the practicality and utility of the product life cycle (PLC) concept as a planning tool, and comparatively few studies have been conducted of the PLC concept in the pharmaceutical industry. The goal of this study was to provide a description of the 15-year trends of new prescription volumes of a sample of the new chemical entity (NCE) drug products introduced from 1963 to 1972, using the PLC concept. To accomplish this goal, the main objective of this study was to assess the curves visually and to determine whether the six PLC curves observed by Cox are representative and exhaustive in the post-Kefauver 1962 Amendment era.