Restructuring in pharmaceuticals is inevitable
Is pharmaceuticals on the verge of a big crisis?
Nowadays, the process of developing a new drug costs about $ 1 billion and takes up to 15 years. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies are cutting costs, and scientists are seriously afraid that in the future humanity may face a shortage of necessary medicines.
The head of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, warned last year that the world is gradually moving towards the so-called "post-antibiotic era", when every antibiotic due to the resistance of microbes can become useless, and many of the most common diseases will become incurable.
On the other hand, along with the aging of the population, more and more cases of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease are being diagnosed, which have not yet been treated.
Broken modelThe pharmaceutical industry can no longer work by the so–called "blockbuster" method - when huge amounts of money are spent on developing innovative medicines to treat a large number of people, and along the way the costs associated with unsuccessful experiments are covered.
Such blockbuster drugs, as a rule, quickly recoup the costs of their development.
However, in recent years, this model has increasingly proved ineffective. In nine cases out of ten, experiments with drugs that seem promising at first glance ultimately end in failure.
In the past, pharmaceutical giants followed the path of least resistance and preferred to work with substances that can be quickly researched, create medicines based on them and put into mass production.
Today, the problem for manufacturers is compounded by the fact that the best-selling and expensive medicines are protected by patents, the validity of which is coming to an end.
Is business hurting science?"We are not well versed in diseases and do not understand how existing drugs work," says Professor Chas Buntra from the University of Oxford.
– Take paracetamol, for example. We all accept it, but we still don't know how it works."
According to Professor Buntra, the search for the necessary protein in the body, which would be affected by a particular drug, most of all resembles a lottery. "There are more than 20 thousand different proteins in the human body and each of them can be the object of scientific research," he says.
Another problem, according to the professor, is that several different pharmaceutical groups can work on the development of one drug at once and in this case duplication cannot be avoided. "We don't publish unsuccessful research results or do it too late," the professor admits. "As a result, other scientists, other companies are working on the same problem, wasting resources and money."
Professor Patrick Vallance, president of research at GlaxoSmithKline, believes that the pharmaceutical industry, on the contrary, has become more open. "We publish the results of research, we give an opportunity to get acquainted with our work," says a representative of GSK.
GlaxoSmithKline, for example, published the results of work on the search for new drugs for malaria, publishing a list of 13.5 thousand substances capable of suppressing the growth of the causative agent of the disease.
Professor Vallance says that this was done precisely in order to combine efforts in solving this difficult task. "Why not let everyone who wants to look at the results of the study, maybe they will succeed in what we failed?" says Patrick Vallance.
Professor Buntra's group also decided to publish the results of their successful and unsuccessful experiments.
Moving forwardProfessor Paul Workman from the British Institute of Cancer Research notes the problem of underfunding the industry.
"On the one hand, there is research and innovation. On the other hand, commercial success and benefit to people. Insufficient funding and a large number of unsuccessful studies lead to the formation of a vacuum between these two components. Some of us call this vacuum the "valley of death," says Professor Workman.
One of the ways to overcome this vacuum is to apply for funding from charitable organizations.
Professor Workman works in an organization where many processes – from research to drug development – take place under one roof. According to him, his organization does not do everything alone, often resorting to the help of partner companies at different stages of activity.
Paul Workman is sure that science does not stand still. "Science is leading us in the opposite direction from blockbuster drugs, towards personalized medicine," he says. – Based on the genetic test, it will be possible to determine which medicine is suitable for a particular patient. Few patients will take advantage of this, but the effect will be significant," Workman believes.
All new models of drug development have one thing in common – cooperation of different organizations is necessary for successful work.
Professor Vallance of GlaxoSmithKline Corporation agrees that cooperation is necessary at the early stages of the development of complex drugs, but later it will inevitably turn into competition.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru23.05.2012