Drug Discovery - Destination unknown?

, den 16. April 2004

This is although the pressure on pharmaceutical companies has distinctly increased. Expiring patents, too little income from sales of high-priced medicines and too few new and promising products in the pipeline. These problems are increasingly giving more and more pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies more than just headaches. A positive feeling is given though by the news that a pharmeutical giant like Novartis expects to receive approval for five products in 2004, and plans the release of eight blockbusters, including hypotensive and cancer drugs, by 2008.
But where is drug research going? It has long been known that key drugs for cancer, AIDS, diabetes and cardiac disease are a necessity for the life of a continually older industrial society.

The increasing spreading of these illnesses contributes further to an ever greater demand. The new EC Directive on clinical trials, which takes force on May 1st, 2004, does nothing to simplify this critical situation. The central point of topical criticism is that the Directive burdens research with extremely high administration costs, which simply cannot be financed by non-commercial committees or specialists in cancer research. All over Europe, researchers are rightly asking if the EC Directive means the end of all non-commercial clinical research. Professor John Crown, of the Irish Clinical Oncology Research Group, doubts that the academic research that led to breakthroughs in childhood leukemia and breast cancer, for example, could have been carried out should the Directive have been in force at that time. A sobering thought!
It remains to be hoped that scientists and politicians find a way of avoiding such an increase in cost and bureaucracy, so that innovative energy survives in drug discovery.

- Rosemarie Asang-Soergel -