The Cause of the Productivity Crisis in Pharmaceutical R&D; the CBCD Draws Conclusions from a Recent Example

Excerpt from the 15 October 2013 report

The Cause of the Productivity Crisis in Pharmaceutical R&D; the CBCD Draws Conclusions from a Recent Example (PRWeb)

“The pharmaceutical industry is experiencing a productivity crisis in R&D. What is this crisis? First, every year, the pharmaceutical industry is introducing fewer new drugs. Second, a portion of the FDA approved drugs are withdrawn from the market. Third, an analysis of Drugs.com shows that all other FDA approved drugs have many side effects.

What is the source of the productivity crisis?

A compelling explanation is offered in a paper published on March, 2012 in the medical journal Nature Reviews. The paper said that “Much of the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D is now based on the idea that high-affinity binding to a single biological target linked to a disease will lead to medical benefit in humans. Indeed, drug-like small molecules tend to bind promiscuously, and this sometimes turns out to have an important role in their efficacy as well as their so-called off-target effects. Targets are parts of complex networks leading to unpredictable effects, and biological systems show a high degree of redundancy, which could blunt the effects of highly targeted drugs (2).”

In simple terms, the idea that a drug binds with only one target is wishful thinking. As it turns out, every drug binds with many targets in the body, the desired one, and many others. Binding to the ‘other’ targets usually causes all the unwanted, surprising, side effects. [my emphasis]

“The CBCD believes that the current understanding of biology is limited and therefore, the Single Target paradigm is bound to fail.” – Greg Bennett, CBCD” “