Where can i find info on new medical drugs being invented?

I read that the FDA is currently testing 200 cancer drugs as we speak, plus the understanding of the genome has opened up the door for a variety of new designer drugs. So does anyone know where i can find info on medical drugs that are currently in the testing phase of the FDA, or at the very least what kinds of new prescripition drugs are being created/tested as we speak?

The FDA doesn’t test drugs, they just approve them. The testing is done by the drug companies under strict guidelines set down by the FDA. I would start by looking around on the FDA website to see if they have a list. A lot of the testing is done at university medical centers that have medical schools.

In the early testing stages the FDA does not have to know about what the drug companies are doing. In some cases they don’t know about the new drugs until the drug company submits all their data for the FDA to review and hopefully approve the drug. The drug companies like to keep things under wraps as much as they can. When they test drugs they normally use a code name such as AB3456 rather than the real chemical name. That way even the patients don’t know what they are getting. Once the drug is approved they have to use the real name and they can also use the brand name such as Zantac - (real/chemical name is ranitidine.)

If you are sick and want to get involved with drug tests (normally called clinical trials) you can ask your doctor about them. They also test drugs on healthy people to make sure they don’t cause problems or have bad side effects. The healthy people get paid to test the drugs.

Do you already know about Clinical Trials.com

http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/

NIH lets you search up to the minute current information about clinical research studies. This is the stage before actual FDA approval process begins, so its not quite right re the first part of the OP.

It also is where you can get info about signing up to be part of studies and is definitely the place where you can find out what kinds of new prescripition drugs are being created/tested as we speak?.

Again though, this is not the FDA & while it reflects almost everything in the pipeline – a huge percentage of the studies (if they yeild anything useful at all), are still probably years away from hitting the market.

Hope it helps.

If you are asking because you know someone who wants to enroll in a clinical trial, in addition to the site mentioned above, check out:

www.centerwatch.com

If you want to know just what’s coming out, I suppose the web page for any pharmaceutical company will tell you that, and there is lots of good information on this site as well.

www.phrma.org

The problem is that many people get false hope from looking at some of these sites (and certainly pharmaceutical company web pages) because it can take up to 12 years for a drug to go from research to the pharmacy shelf and hundreds of millions of dollars along the way. So if you have the disease now, and a research candidate is available, you may die of the disease before it gets released. Also consider the inherent business problem of what happens if you get a RARE disease. Considering the cost of developing the drug, the pharmaceutical company needs to know there is a market on the other end of the process that will recoup the costs of the research and development AND make a profit. Rare diseases don’t do that because too few people have them.

There are, of course, patent extensions and other provisions available for companies that pursue small market drugs (as part of the Orphan Drug Act), but investors in pharmaceutical stocks don’t want to hear about your potential cure for ‘Type B non-small cell lung carcinoma’ which affects X thousand people worldwide. They want to hear about your cure for breast cancer which affects Y BILLION people, because that’s where the money is, and the return on investment.

I work in a pharmaceutical company, and while I cannot speak of actual products we make, I can tell you that as an outsourcing company which does various stages of development for larger companies, we are working on the cure to pretty much anything. HIV and AIDS, cancer, Parkinsons, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, dandruff…you name it, there’s a company out there working on it. The problem is, though, most of these drugs will never actually BE a cure, assuming they make it onto the market at all.

I suppose your best bet, at least to get an idea of what actually has any hope of becoming available, is to look at the clinical trials available. The drugs might eventually fail, but in the mean time it should give you a general idea of what’s out there, and perhaps what’s yet to come.