If you wish 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 have very little to point out for it.

In 1971, throughout 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 private R&D, concerning $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.  This cash produced 1.fifty six million papers on cancer. Nevertheless, today we have a tendency to aren’t any closer to a cure than we were in 1971.  Why?

Take into account what Dr. Almog said in his paper: Drug Business in “depression” (Almog, D. Drug trade in “depression”. Med Sci Monit. 2005 Jan;11(1):SR1-4, I would urge you to scan his paper, it’s an eye fixed opener on relationship between tutorial analysis and business drug discovery): “When the fundamental science/biology of disease isn’t obtainable, no new medication come to market.” With the billion of dollars spent by the NIH on basic science, and also the legion papers revealed on the topic, the query is, “Why isn’t the essential science/biology of disease available? Individual discoveries in the biology of human disease are cornerstone in new treatments. However, in drug discovery, these basic science/biology discoveries are seemingly unrelated dots. To connect the dots you need a theory. The Blind Men and therefore the Elephant may be a famous story concerning six blind men encountering an elephant for the primary time. Each man, seizing on the single feature of the animal, which he appeared to have 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, an admirer or a rope, depending on whether the blind men had 1st grasped the creature’s side, tusk, trunk, knee, ear or tail. The story epitomizes the problem 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, kind II diabetes, alopecia, kind 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 recent drugs introduced by pharmaceutical companies. Consider what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new medicine from the pharmaceutical trade (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 business believe that the worldwide marketplace for their merchandise will last expanding by around 10% a year, with the United States continuing to guide towards higher per capita outlays. Expenditure on research by the pharmaceutical trade is additionally increasing worldwide. It is now over $45bn a year—twice the total recorded at the start of the 1990s—and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Considerations are growing, however, concerning the productivity of research being funded by the foremost pharmaceutical companies. … Empirical proof indicates a crisis in productivity in pharmaceutical research. The number 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 range of latest active substances undergoing regulatory review continues to be falling.”

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

The NIH failed to provide the therefore much required biology of chronic disease as a result of it’s caught within the reductionist mentality.  Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative.  If we have a tendency to want a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we have a tendency to want to significantly think about his alternative.