New Anxiety, Bipolar and Depression Drugs in the Pipeline?

What happens when the drug pipeline for common mental health concerns — such as depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder — starts to dry up? “Most psychiatric drugs in use today originated in serendipitous discoveries made many decades ago,” according to a recent article on Science News by Laura Sanders. And it’s true — we can trace back today’s most popular psychiatric drugs to discoveries made over 30 — and in some cases, 40! — years ago. Because of the heady cost of drug development — costing hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a new drug to market — most pharmaceutical companies have been playing it safe these past few decades. They’ve been working on developing “me too” drugs — subtle molecular changes to existing compounds. Which means the pipeline is darned near empty of truly new drugs likely to come out in the next 5 to 10 years for the most common types of mental illness. This provides the drug company with two things. The first is a new medicine they can patent and sell at a significant markup over the old, generic drug it’s based off of. The second is the illusion of progress, of releasing something that is “new and better” than the old thing — but which additional research almost always demonstrates is simply as good — not better — than the old thing (and usually with a different — not better — side effect profile). So...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Tags: Antidepressant Antipsychotic General Medications Research Treatment Additional Research Article On Science Bipolar Depression Common Mental Health Depression Anxiety Depression Drugs Drug Pipeline Drugs In Use Generic Drug Il Source Type: blogs