If you would like a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, don’t 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, throughout the State of the Union address, President Nixon declared the war on cancer proposing “an intensive campaign to search out a cure for cancer.” Since 1971, Americans spent, through taxes, donations, and private R&D, concerning $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. This cash made 1.56 million papers on cancer. Yet, nowadays we are not any nearer to a cure than we were in 1971. Why?
Contemplate what Dr. Almog said in his paper: Drug Industry in “depression” (Almog, D. Drug trade in “depression”. Med Sci Monit. 2005 Jan;11(1):SR1-4, I would urge you to scan his paper, it’s a watch opener on relationship between academic research and commercial drug discovery): “When the basic science/biology of disease isn’t offered, no new drugs return to market.” With the billion of bucks spent by the NIH on basic science, and the innumerable papers published on the topic, the query is, “Why isn’t the fundamental science/biology of disease offered? 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 connect the dots you need a theory. The Blind Men and the Elephant is a famous story concerning six blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. Each man, seizing on the only feature of the animal, that he appeared to possess touched first, and being incapable of seeing it whole, loudly maintained his restricted opinion on the nature 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 first grasped the creature’s side, 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 alternative 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 new medicine introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Take into account what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new medication from the pharmaceutical trade (Taylor D. Fewer new medicine 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 world marketplace for their product can persist expanding by around 10% a year, with the United States continuing to steer towards higher per capita outlays. Expenditure on analysis by the pharmaceutical trade is also increasing worldwide. It’s 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, concerning the productivity of analysis being funded by the key 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 new active substances undergoing regulatory review is still 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 situation the productivity crisis in drug discovery.
The NIH failed to supply the therefore a lot of needed biology of chronic disease because it’s caught in the reductionist mentality. Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative. If we have a tendency to wish a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we tend to want to significantly consider his alternative.