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 money they have spent on researching these diseases, they have terribly very little to point out for it.
In 1971, during the State of the Union address, President Nixon declared the war on cancer proposing “an intensive campaign to seek out a cure for cancer.” Since 1971, Americans spent, through taxes, donations, and personal R&D, about $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. This money made 1.fifty six million papers on cancer. However, nowadays we have a tendency to aren’t any closer to a cure than we tend to were in 1971. Why?
Consider what Dr. Almog said in his paper: Drug Business in “depression” (Almog, D. Drug trade in “depression”. Med Sci Monit. 2005 Jan;11(1):SR1-4, I might urge you to scan his paper, it’s a watch opener on relationship between academic research and business drug discovery): “When the essential science/biology of disease isn’t accessible, no new medicine return to market.” With the billion of bucks spent by the NIH on basic science, and therefore the innumerable papers revealed on the topic, the question is, “Why isn’t the basic 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 need a theory. The Blind Men and therefore the Elephant could be a famous story concerning six blind men encountering an elephant for the primary time. Each man, seizing on the only feature of the animal, that he appeared to possess touched 1st, and being incapable of seeing it whole, loudly maintained his restricted opinion on the character of the beast. The elephant was considered a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, an acquaintance or a rope, depending on whether the blind men had 1st 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 the Origin of Chronic Disease, by Hanan Polansky [11], presents an alternative. The book identifies the disruption that causes atherosclerosis, cancer, obesity, osteoarthritis, sort 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 amount of recent medication introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Take into account what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new medicine from the pharmaceutical trade (Taylor D. Fewer new drugs 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 industry believe that the worldwide market for their merchandise can go on 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 also increasing worldwide. It is currently over $45bn a year—twice the sum recorded at the start of the 1990s—and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Issues are growing, but, about the productivity of analysis being funded by the foremost pharmaceutical companies. … Empirical evidence 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 general variety of latest active substances undergoing regulatory review is still falling.”
On the one hand, the expenditure on research is increasing. On the other, the amount of new drugs is decreasing. The professionals call this example the productivity crisis in drug discovery.
The NIH failed to provide the therefore a lot of needed biology of chronic disease as a result of it’s caught in the reductionist mentality. Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative. If we wish a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we tend to would like to noticeably think about his alternative.