If you want a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, do not count on the academia, the National Institute of Health (NIH), or the biotech/pharmaceutical industry.  With all the cash they have spent on researching these diseases, they need terribly very little to point out for it.

In 1971, during the State of the Union address, President Nixon declared the war on cancer proposing “an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer.”  Since 1971, Americans spent, through taxes, donations, and personal R&D, about $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.  This money created 1.56 million papers on cancer. Yet, these days we have a tendency to are no closer to a cure than we tend to were in 1971.  Why?

Think about what Dr. Almog said in his paper: Drug Trade in “depression” (Almog, D. Drug business in “depression”. Med Sci Monit. 2005 Jan;11(1):SR1-4, I might urge you to read his paper, it’s an eye opener on relationship between educational research and business drug discovery): “When the basic science/biology of disease isn’t out there, no new drugs come back to market.” With the billion of dollars spent by the NIH on basic science, and therefore the countless papers published on the subject, the question is, “Why isn’t the essential science/biology of disease on the market? Individual discoveries within the biology of human disease are cornerstone in new treatments. However, in drug discovery, these basic science/biology discoveries are seemingly unrelated dots. To attach the dots you would like a theory. The Blind Men and also the Elephant could be a famous story regarding six blind men encountering an elephant for the primary time. Every man, seizing on the one feature of the animal, which he appeared to possess touched 1st, and being incapable of seeing it whole, loudly maintained his limited opinion on the character of the beast. The elephant was thought of a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a disciple or a rope, depending on whether or not the blind men had initial grasped the creature’s side, tusk, trunk, knee, ear or tail. The story epitomizes the matter of the reductionist approach in biology. A recent book Microcompetition with Foreign DNA and therefore the Origin of Chronic Disease, by Hanan Polansky [11], presents an alternative. The book identifies the disruption that causes atherosclerosis, cancer, obesity, osteoarthritis, type II diabetes, alopecia, sort I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, asthma, lupus, thyroiditis, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, graft versus host disease, and other 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 number of new medication introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Consider what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new drugs from the pharmaceutical business (Taylor D. Fewer new medication 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 merchandise can go on expanding by around 10% a year, with the United States continuing to lead towards higher per capita outlays. Expenditure on research by the pharmaceutical industry is additionally increasing worldwide. It’s currently over $45bn a year—twice the sum recorded at the beginning of the 1990s—and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Issues are growing, but, regarding the productivity of analysis being funded by the main pharmaceutical companies. … Empirical evidence indicates a crisis in productivity in pharmaceutical research. The quantity 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 recent active substances undergoing regulatory review continues to be falling.”

On the one hand, the expenditure on research is increasing.  On the opposite, the number of new drugs is decreasing.  The professionals decision this situation the productivity crisis in drug discovery.

The NIH failed to provide the so a lot of required biology of chronic disease because it is caught within 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 have a tendency to would like to significantly contemplate his alternative.