A Lengthy View of Everything that is Wrong with the Drug Development Industry

The primary problems with drug development are self-evident from the data. Firstly the process of drug development has become enormously more expensive over the past seventy years, a period in in which rapid technological progress has diminished the cost and effort required for any task in pharmacology and biotechnology by orders of magnitude. Secondly, the pace at which useful new medicines emerge in the clinic has diminished considerably, over the same period of technological progress in which the bounds of the possible have opened up enormously. The article I'll point out today is well worth reading, a lengthy treatment of these problems and the various viewpoints on what has caused the present dismal state of drug development. I am not sympathetic to the argument that drug development has become inherently harder for technical reasons. I am sympathetic to the viewpoint that regulation and the inherent waste and misaligned incentives present in governments and other large organizations are to blame. Given that the pace of drug development in the longevity industry is an existential question for all of us, determining how long and in what state of health we will live, it becomes ever more important to ask how the present dismal state of drug development can be changed for the better. How can it be made faster and cheaper to produce new medical technologies? Or to put it another way, how can we get rid of the ball and chain that has been applied to the process of prod...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Politics and Legislation Source Type: blogs