Forget the heal for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes. Unless …
Friday, December 25th, 2009If 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 money they need spent on researching these diseases, they have 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 find a cure for cancer.” Since 1971, Americans spent, through taxes, donations, and private R&D, concerning $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. This money created 1.fifty six million papers on cancer. Nevertheless, these days we have a tendency to are no nearer to a cure than we tend to were in 1971. Why?
Consider 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’d urge you to scan his paper, it’s a watch opener on relationship between educational research and industrial drug discovery): “When the essential science/biology of disease isn’t out there, no new medication come to market.” With the billion of dollars spent by the NIH on basic science, and therefore the a lot of papers printed on the topic, the question is, “Why isn’t the fundamental science/biology of disease obtainable? Individual discoveries within 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 also the Elephant is a famous story about six blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. Every man, seizing on the only feature of the animal, that he appeared to have touched 1st, and being incapable of seeing it whole, loudly maintained his limited opinion on the character of the beast. The elephant was thought of a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, an exponent or a rope, relying on whether the blind men had initial grasped the creature’s aspect, 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, kind II diabetes, alopecia, kind 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 recent medication introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Contemplate what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new medication from the pharmaceutical industry (Taylor D. Fewer new medication from the pharmaceutical industry. BMJ. 2003 Feb 22;326(7386):408-9): “In 2002 spending on medicines exceeded $400bn (£248bn; 377bn) worldwide. Optimists in the pharmaceutical industry believe that the worldwide market 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 industry is additionally increasing worldwide. It is currently over $45bn a year—twice the add recorded at the beginning of the 1990s—and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Concerns are growing, however, concerning the productivity of research being funded by the foremost 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 an average of over 60 a year in the late 1980s to 52 in 1991 and only 31 in 2001. The overall variety 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 needed biology of chronic disease because it’s caught within the reductionist mentality. Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative. If we tend to need a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we tend to would like to noticeably think about his alternative.
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