If you want 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 have very very little to show for it.
In 1971, during 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 personal R&D, regarding $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. This cash created 1.fifty six million papers on cancer. Nonetheless, these days we tend to are no closer to a cure than we were in 1971. Why?
Consider what Dr. Almog said in his paper: Drug Business in “depression” (Almog, D. Drug industry in “depression”. Med Sci Monit. 2005 Jan;11(1):SR1-4, I might urge you to read his paper, it’s an eye fixed opener on relationship between academic research and business drug discovery): “When the fundamental science/biology of disease isn’t obtainable, no new medicine return to market.” With the billion of bucks spent by the NIH on basic science, and also the lots of papers printed on the topic, the question is, “Why isn’t the essential science/biology of disease on the market? Individual discoveries in the biology of human disease are cornerstone in new treatments. However, in drug discovery, these basic science/biology discoveries are seemingly unrelated dots. To connect the dots you would like a theory. The Blind Men and therefore the Elephant is a famous story concerning six blind men encountering an elephant for the primary time. Every man, seizing on the only feature of the animal, that he appeared to own touched first, and being incapable of seeing it whole, loudly maintained his restricted opinion on the nature of the beast. The elephant was thought-about a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan or a rope, relying on whether the blind men had 1st grasped the creature’s side, tusk, trunk, knee, ear or tail. The story epitomizes the problem of the reductionist approach in biology. A recent book Microcompetition with Foreign DNA and therefore 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, sort 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 quantity of recent drugs introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Contemplate 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 world marketplace for their merchandise can go on expanding by around 10% a year, with the United States continuing to steer towards higher per capita outlays. Expenditure on research by the pharmaceutical business is also increasing worldwide. It’s currently over $45bn a year—twice the add recorded at the start of the 1990s—and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Concerns are growing, but, about the productivity of research being funded by the most important pharmaceutical companies. … Empirical evidence indicates a crisis in productivity in pharmaceutical research. The number of medicines introduced worldwide that contain new active ingredients dropped from an average 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 analysis is increasing. On the opposite, the amount of recent drugs is decreasing. The professionals decision this case the productivity crisis in drug discovery.
The NIH failed to supply the therefore much required biology of chronic disease as a result of it’s caught in the reductionist mentality. Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative. If we tend to need a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we would like to significantly contemplate his alternative.