Discovering medicines
It takes a long time to find a new medicine and then to complete the testing needed to bring it to patients—10 to 15 years on average.1 If you had a child in kindergarten, he or she would be a senior in high school before a new medicine we're working on today would be available. Why so long?
We first have to answer many important questions:
- How do we attack the disease? Do we block how it spreads? How it multiplies in the body? Can we boost the body's ability to fight off the disease?
- What might work? Is it safe for people? Does it work? How well? What's the right dose?
- How can we make this medicine? Can it be in a pill? Does it need refrigeration?
There are many, many questions that take a lot of time and effort to answer. In fact, the information required fills 100,000 pages or more2—or a stack of paper more than 25 feet high.
And the answers aren't always clear and obvious. The process can be filled with disappointment for researchers—very few potential medicines make it through the years of required testing before being approved for use by patients.
The medicines that have made it, though, have allowed us to come a long way in treating diseases and providing hope.
Did you know?
- In 2005, the pharmaceutical industry invested more than $39 billion to develop better medicines
- Pharmaceutical researchers may screen more than a million drug possibilities to find one promising lead
- Every hour of every day, we invest more than $500,000 searching for—and developing—new medicines
- Every day, we donate more than $1 million worth of medicines to patients in need in the US and around the world
Infectious diseases
Resistant Target—Staphylococcus aureus, is a common cause of hospital infections that can be serious and even fatal. Staph began to develop resistance to penicillin in the 1940s, only a few years after the antibiotic became available. To combat resistance, methicillin was introduced in the 1960s, yet methicillin-resistant staph soon appeared as well. There are now a few reports of staph infections resistant even to vancomycin, an antibiotic of last resort. What is more, staph infections are now sometimes found in the general community, not just in hospitals.
References
- Inside R&D. Available at: http://www.innovation.org/index.cfm/nonav/Inside_R_&_D. Accessed April 21, 2005.
- Bruce I. New standard cut drug paperwork. Available at: http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/tcaw/09/i11/html/ 11bruce.html. Accessed April 25, 2006.
“To think that my mom could have seen me go into the first grade… or somebody else’s mom is going to be able to do that is important to me, and that’s what I’m holding on to.”
—David Rusnak, GSK Researcher
