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 need spent on researching these diseases, they need 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 find a cure for cancer." Since 1971, Americans spent, through taxes, donations, and non-public R&D, about $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. This money created 1.56 million papers on cancer. Yet, nowadays we tend to are not any closer to a cure than we were in 1971. Why?
Think about 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 would urge you to browse his paper, it's an eye opener on relationship between academic analysis and business drug discovery): "When the essential science/biology of disease is not offered, no new medication come to market." With the billion of dollars spent by the NIH on basic science, and also the several papers revealed on the subject, the question is, "Why isn’t the basic science/biology of disease available? Individual discoveries in the biology of human disease are cornerstone in new treatments. But, in drug discovery, these basic science/biology discoveries are seemingly unrelated dots. To attach the dots you need a theory. The Blind Men and also the Elephant is a famous story regarding six blind men encountering an elephant for the primary time. Every man, seizing on the single feature of the animal, which 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 admirer or a rope, depending on whether or not the blind men had 1st grasped the creature’s aspect, tusk, trunk, knee, ear or tail. The story epitomizes the matter 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, type 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 quantity of recent medicine introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Think about what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new medication from the pharmaceutical trade (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 business believe that the world market for their product can last expanding by around 10% a year, with the United States continuing to lead towards higher per capita outlays. Expenditure on research by the pharmaceutical industry is additionally increasing worldwide. It's now over $45bn a year---twice the sum recorded at the beginning of the 1990s---and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Considerations are growing, but, regarding the productivity of analysis being funded by the major pharmaceutical companies. ... Empirical evidence indicates a crisis in productivity in pharmaceutical research. The quantity 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 overall range of latest active substances undergoing regulatory review continues to be falling."
On the one hand, the expenditure on research is increasing. On the other, the amount of latest medication is decreasing. The professionals call this case the productivity crisis in drug discovery.
The NIH failed to provide the therefore abundant required biology of chronic disease as a result of it's caught in the reductionist mentality. Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative. If we have a tendency to want a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we have a tendency to would like to noticeably consider his alternative.
