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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13906

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

New Report: The Truth About Drug Innovation
PharmaLive 2008 Jun 24
http://pharmalive.com/news/index.cfm?articleID=551858&categoryid=43&newsletter=1


Full text:

A new report co-authored by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Benjamin Zycher, and Joseph DiMasi, and Christopher-Paul Milne, researchers from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, examines case histories for thirty-five important pharmaceutical innovations. Skeptics of the private industry assert that the development of new medicines is most attributable to publicly funded sources.

As Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, remarked during an interview with PBS News : “Innovation comes mainly from NIH-supported research in academic medical centers. The drug companies do almost no innovation.”

In this new study, the authors debunk this assertion and argue that the private sector plays a critical role in drug development.

Key findings include:

NIH-sponsored research tends to be concentrated on the basic science of disease biology, biochemistry, and disease processes, the goal of which is to identify biologic targets that might prove vulnerable to drugs yet to be developed.
Private sector contributions are weighted heavily toward the applied science of discovering ways to pursue treatments and cures for adverse medical conditions.
The authors conclude that NIH-sponsored and private-sector drug research are complementary to one another and are equally necessary in order to provide patients with better care and treatment.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909