If you want a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, don’t count on the academia, the National Institute of Health (NIH), or the biotech/pharmaceutical industry.  With all the money they need spent on researching these diseases, they have terribly little to indicate for it.

In 1971, throughout the State of the Union address, President Nixon declared the war on cancer proposing “an intensive campaign to seek out a cure for cancer.”  Since 1971, Americans spent, through taxes, donations, and private R&D, regarding $200 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.  This cash produced 1.56 million papers on cancer. Nonetheless, these days we aren’t any nearer to a cure than we tend to were in 1971.  Why?

Consider what Dr. Almog said in his paper: Drug Business in “depression” (Almog, D. Drug business in “depression”. Med Sci Monit. 2005 Jan;11(1):SR1-4, I’d urge you to read his paper, it’s an eye fixed opener on relationship between tutorial analysis and commercial drug discovery): “When the basic 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 therefore the legion papers published on the subject, the question is, “Why isn’t the fundamental science/biology of disease on the market? Individual discoveries in the biology of human disease are cornerstone in new treatments. But, in drug discovery, these basic science/biology discoveries are seemingly unrelated dots. To attach the dots you wish a theory. The Blind Men and therefore the Elephant may be a famous story concerning six blind men encountering an elephant for the first time. Each man, seizing on the only feature of the animal, which he appeared to have touched first, and being incapable of seeing it whole, loudly maintained his restricted opinion on the nature 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 aspect, 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 also 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, type 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. Contemplate what professor Taylor says in his paper: Fewer new medicine from the pharmaceutical trade (Taylor D. Fewer new medicine 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 world market 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 business is additionally increasing worldwide. It’s now over $45bn a year—twice the total recorded at the start of the 1990s—and projected to rise to $55bn by 2005-6. Issues are growing, but, about the productivity of research being funded by the key 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 an average of over 60 a year within the late 1980s to 52 in 1991 and only 31 in 2001. The variety of recent active substances undergoing regulatory review continues to be falling.”

On the one hand, the expenditure on analysis is increasing.  On the opposite, the amount of latest drugs is decreasing.  The professionals call this situation the productivity crisis in drug discovery.

The NIH failed to provide the so a lot of required biology of chronic disease as a result of it is caught in the reductionist mentality.  Dr. Hanan Polansky offers an alternative.  If we want a cure for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer, or diabetes, we would like to seriously think about his alternative.