More questions than answers

How does it all fit together? Although technologies for discovering new targets have been significantly improved in recent years, the costs for research and development have risen sky-high in relation to the number of drugs actually approved.
, den 13. Juni 2002

In the last 10 years, the total investment made by pharmaceutical companies in R&D has grown 6-fold to around 40 million US dollars (Frost & Sullivan, Balaji, K., 2002). From the business economics point of view, therefore, and measured against R&D costs, the revenue from the sale of drugs is presently too low. The question of the efficiency of current drug development comes up almost automatically. In face of expiring patents for numerous block busters, pharmaceutical concerns are now urgently looking towards the biotechnology area for new developments which are ready for market introduction. The result come to by a further international study, in this case carried out by Boston Consulting Group business consultants, could possibly be helpful. They also went into detail on the apparent discrepancy between expense and income in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research. According to the study "A Revolution in R&D - Part II: The Impact of Genetics", a greater use of pharmacogenetics and disease genetics could lower the time expenditure for the development of new drugs and possibly help reduce R&D costs. Whereby the market researchers very critically illuminated the potential and the risks a company in drug research is open to. It is not just the question of a more efficient drug development that is presently the focus of attention, however, as clarification is also still needed on whether genes or gene sequences which are discovered can be patented or not. This question is looked into in the article "How to Patent Genes or Gene Sequences" in this issue (page 56). The most sensible selection of research activities is also an extensively ethical problem: Is it worthwhile - economically - to develop drugs for treating extremely rare illnesses, such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA)? Only about 1 child in ten thousand is born with SMA. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to put the efforts into developing new drugs to combat HIV or Alzheimer's disease? Which way should be taken, then, to develop new and effective drugs? All research methods are open to question: Should one attach more importance to bioinformatics, to evaluate the amount of data already produced, or stop using high throughput screening to generate purposeful data? There seem to be more questions than answers - but despite this, we are getting a little nearer to our objective every single day.

Rosemarie Asang-Soergel