The Diabetes Manager

Posts Tagged ‘medical discovery’

If you wish a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, do not count on the academia, the National Institute of Health (NIH), or the biotech/pharmaceutical industry.  With all the cash they need spent on researching these diseases, they need very very little to indicate for it.

In 1971, throughout the State of the Union address, President Nixon declared the war on cancer proposing “an intensive campaign to search out a cure for cancer.”  Since 1971, Americans spent, through taxes, donations, and private R&D, concerning $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.  This money produced 1.56 million papers on cancer. Yet, these days we have a tendency to are no nearer to a cure than we tend to were in 1971.  Why?

Contemplate what Dr. Almog said in his paper: Drug Trade in “depression” (Almog, D. Drug business in “depression”. Med Sci Monit. 2005 Jan;11(1):SR1-4, I would urge you to read his paper, it’s an eye opener on relationship between educational analysis and commercial drug discovery): “When the essential science/biology of disease isn’t accessible, no new medication come to market.” With the billion of greenbacks spent by the NIH on basic science, and therefore the various papers published on the topic, the question is, “Why isn’t the fundamental science/biology of disease obtainable? Individual discoveries in the biology of human disease are cornerstone in new treatments. But, in drug discovery, these basic science/biology discoveries are seemingly unrelated dots. To attach the dots you wish a theory. The Blind Men and therefore the Elephant may be a famous story about six blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. Each man, seizing on the single feature of the animal, which he appeared to own touched first, and being incapable of seeing it whole, loudly maintained his limited opinion on the character of the beast. The elephant was considered a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan or a rope, depending on whether or not the blind men had initial grasped the creature’s aspect, tusk, trunk, knee, ear or tail. The story epitomizes the matter of the reductionist approach in biology. A recent book Microcompetition with Foreign DNA and the Origin of Chronic Disease, by Hanan Polansky [11], presents an alternative. The book identifies the disruption that causes atherosclerosis, cancer, obesity, osteoarthritis, type II diabetes, alopecia, type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, asthma, lupus, thyroiditis, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, graft versus host disease, and other chronic diseases, and describes the sequence of events that leads from the disruption to the molecular, cellular, and clinical effects.”

What are the implications of the NIH failure?  A decline in the number of latest medicine introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Think about what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new medication from the pharmaceutical industry (Taylor D. Fewer new medicine from the pharmaceutical industry. BMJ. 2003 Feb 22;326(7386):408-9): “In 2002 spending on medicines exceeded $400bn (£248bn; 377bn) worldwide. Optimists within the pharmaceutical business believe that the global marketplace for their products will persist expanding by around 10% a year, with the United States continuing to guide towards higher per capita outlays. Expenditure on research by the pharmaceutical trade is additionally increasing worldwide. It’s now over $45bn a year—twice the add recorded at the start of the 1990s—and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Issues are growing, however, about the productivity of research being funded by the key pharmaceutical companies. … Empirical proof indicates a crisis in productivity in pharmaceutical research. The amount of medicines introduced worldwide that contain new active ingredients dropped from a median of over 60 a year within the late 1980s to 52 in 1991 and only 31 in 2001. The number of recent active substances undergoing regulatory review is still falling.”

On the one hand, the expenditure on research is increasing.  On the other, the quantity of recent medicine is decreasing.  The professionals decision this example the productivity crisis in drug discovery.

The NIH failed to supply the so abundant required biology of chronic disease as a result of it’s caught within the reductionist mentality.  Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative.  If we need a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we tend to would like to noticeably consider his alternative.