Why are drugs so hard to make and take so long to come out on the market?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Because – and we can’t say this too many times – biology is not mathematics or electronics.

There are more than 20,000 protein-producing genes in the human body, many of which produce multiple proteins. There are several times more whose function is to regulate those proteins. Those aren’t just necessarily A affects B interactions, either. Protein A could affect dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of operations in the body.

Out of all those millions of actions, reactions and interactions, scientists must find a) which ones are bad, b) something that actually turns the bad off, c) without damaging all the good actions, reactions, and interactions, d) that works consistently enough to be considered “safe and effective,” and e) can actually be produced in the real world.

And then, you have to test and retest the compound to make sure it’s actually having an effect, not just a coincidence. You have to test it over time to make sure the body doesn’t rebel against it. And you have to test it in different populations to make sure its effects are predictable in men or women, old or young people, and so on.

Certainly computers and models can help. Computers are very good at going through huge amounts of data and uncovering trends that would take humans forever (if they noticed at all.)

But the process is completely different from developing a faster computer chip, so thinking that having a computer that’s 10 times faster will lead to discoveries coming 10 times faster is simply wrong.

22

Incidentally, sweat209, the same reasons, more or less, apply to the “stagnating technology” thread you started a while back.

Innovation in medicine is almost guaranteed to occur, but it is not the case we can predict or even absolutely specify the pace or direction of such innovation.

23

But you still did not answer the question above.

Because if side effects or testing is the main bottleneck all the money or young people going to school to be medical researchers are not going to speed things up.

And will take a long time.
If it was not for side effects most cancers will have cure by now.

Remember chemotherapy can make you very ill or even kill you.You want better results you can up the chemotherapy but that will kill you.

If side effects or testing is the main bottleneck than I’m not sure how we can fix that.

The public things in terms of year or two with technology advances.But medicine and drugs 10 to 15 years if the main bottleneck is studies and research on new drugs and testing takes 10 to 15 years.

So it not technology slow down it is bottleneck that takes 10 to 15 years.

24

He gave you an EXCELLENT answer. You did not understand it.

This is so trivially obvious as to be meaningless. We could kill each and every disease in existence by shooting it with a gun, if not for the pesky “bleeding out and dying” side effect. It’s like saying, “If it weren’t for the fact that I’m too heavy, not muscular enough, and don’t have wings, I could fly!”

Money. Sadly, the only really productive thing we can do is throw money at the problem. More money gets more people, with more talent and brains, working on more problems, in more ways. That’s the best we can do. Unfortunately, as has been mentioned, public funding for science in the US is horrible and getting worse, and neither political party shows any sign of ever doing anything about it. The only other group with the required finances is private pharmaceutical companies, and half the population thinks they’re evil. And they will only fund projects that are likely to produce a return on the investment.

25

Why? Because the easy ones have been done. No great mystery here.

26

All three, and more, such as figuring out what receptor sites exist and are relevant.

Nonsense. Whatever would make you think that? The more people you have working on a problem and the more money they have to spend on research and testing, the more stuff they can test in a given time period, so it will take less time to find something that works.

It will never be a 5 minute job, but there is plenty of scope for speeding things up with more money and with training and hiring more people.

27

The US spends more on healthcare than any country in the world.A large junk of the GDP is spent on healthcare.The sad thing is run away healthcare costs in the US.

And no no sign of slowing down.It is getting more and more out of control.

28

Read the thread again.

Q .Why are drugs so hard to make and take so long to come out on the market?
Reload this Page Reply to Thread

A. Thanks to computers they can run hundreds of tests at a time. Computers, however, do not speed up the time it takes for a tumor to develop, or the time it takes to shrink.
A. Drugs need to be tested to be sure they don’t kill people. Ideally, this includes longitudinal studies. They need to be tested for next generation effects, too. My mother was offered thalidomide, which, fortunately, she declined.

A. We still have to run all the test in real time and observe the effects over time. No way to speed that up.
A Even if you can use computers to design promising molecules, you still have to figure out how to make those molecules, which can be very difficult, actually make them (which may not be easy - especially making the stuff in large enough quantities to be commercially viable), and then test them, first in vitro and on animals, and then on humans, to see if they actually work and do not have side effects worse than their benefits.

A A target is not a treatment. In other words, just because it appears that hitting receptor A has an effect on B doesn’t mean it will actually work in animals or humans.
A Even if your model is the world’s greatest, everything else I wrote still holds. Your molecule may not actually hit the target receptor. It may hit the receptor but not have the desired effect. It may be rather promiscuous and hit other, undesired targets as well. The pharmacokinetics may be terrible. The synthesis may be impossible, at least on any reasonable scale.

A **There are more than 20,000 protein-producing genes in the human body, many of which produce multiple proteins. There are several times more whose function is to regulate those proteins. Those aren’t just necessarily A affects B interactions, either. Protein A could affect dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of operations in the body.

Out of all those millions of actions, reactions and interactions, scientists must find a) which ones are bad, b) something that actually turns the bad off, c) without damaging all the good actions, reactions, and interactions, d) that works consistently enough to be considered “safe and effective,” and e) can actually be produced in the real world.**

So yes I got many answers here why drugs are hard to make and take so log.

But I guess I was looking for main bottleneck. I mean if all the above are the main bottleneck than I can see why.

The last one in bold I can see why.

But I guess how could we speed things up? Are things going to get better in the future?

29

Spending money on health care is in no way equivalent to spending money on research and development.

30

The future may be smart drug delivery!! Looks very interesting what they are doing.

Targeted drug delivery, sometimes called smart drug delivery,[1] is a method of delivering medication to a patient in a manner that increases the concentration of the medication in some parts of the body relative to others. The goal of a targeted drug delivery system is to prolong, localize, target and have a protected drug interaction with the diseased tissue.

The conventional drug delivery system is the absorption of the drug across a biological membrane, whereas the targeted release system releases the drug in a dosage form. The advantages to the targeted release system is the reduction in the frequency of the dosages taken by the patient, having a more uniform effect of the drug, reduction of drug side-effects, and reduced fluctuation in circulating drug levels.

The disadvantage of the system is high cost, which makes productivity more difficult and the reduced ability to adjust the dosages.

And

Targeted therapy or molecularly targeted therapy is one of the major modalities of medical treatment (pharmacotherapy) for cancer, others being hormonal therapy and cytotoxic chemotherapy. Targeted therapy blocks the growth of cancer cells by interfering with specific targeted molecules needed for carcinogenesis and tumor growth,[1] rather than by simply interfering with all rapidly dividing cells (e.g. with traditional chemotherapy). The term biologic therapy is sometimes synonymous with targeted therapy when used in the context of cancer therapy (and thus distinguished from chemotherapy, that is, cytotoxic therapy). However, the modalities can be combined; antibody-drug conjugates combine biologic and cytotoxic mechanisms into one targeted therapy.

Targeted cancer therapies are expected to be more effective than older forms of treatments and less harmful to normal cells

31

If anyone is interested, there’s a free graduate level MOOC on Coursera that actually starts tomorrow.

Drug Discovery, Development & Commercialization:

Even if you don’t want to spend the time on the course, you can register for free and view the materials. There’s also a discussion forum where everyone in the course can participate and by definition has an interest in the topic.

32

I’m very busy this year and probably next you too.May be in tow or three years from now. In a mean time a book instruction ( no pre chemistry ,biology or human body needed) would be better.

33

Well that see.

No cure for dementia ,alzheimer’s ,autoimmune disease , ( MS) neuron disease ,amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) , Parkinson ,diabetes ,Multiple sclerosis ( MS) neuron disease ,stroke patients ,spinal cord injury ,liver failure and kidney failure.

And to say autoimmune disease and cancer is very bad just terrible.

So I can understand the general public losing faith with modern medicine.

I can see if the rate of technology progression was going at rate by 2050 all those things will have cure for.

If one or two every 10 years.
So I don’t see how money and more people will help.

I’m sure there are hundreds of people working on these problems I’m talking about.

34

Your response demonstrates exactly zero comprehension of the point of my post to which you were responding, so I don’t see much point in attempting to repeat it.

35

And that’s a problem with you, not with medical research.

36

Just because you through money at the problem does not mean it will come reality.

Take the other threads similar.

Like AI ,robots like in the movies ,force field ,warp drive ,starship ,laser guns ,anti-gravity ,space elevator and other stuff scfi stuff. NASA spends a lot money on out range way programs from 1996 to 2002.And time to time DARPA spends money research on this crazy programs too.

Just because you’re through money at it , does not make it come reality. And some of these things may never come reality.

** Is the war on cancer an ‘utter failure’?: A sobering look at how billions in research money is spent**

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Just because you throw money at it does not make it reality.

Those things I talked about above they have been doing research for over 100 years and over 50% if you want to call really modern medicine.

Some of these statistics cancer is bit old. So if you have new statistics on percent of people who get cancer and the cancer survival rates are a bit better you can post it.

It still not good.

37

No, it’s not. It is, however, leaps and bounds better than it used to be. And it continues to get better each year. Some problems are hard.

Are you complaining that some diseases suck? Because no one is going to argue with you.

Are you complaining that medical research isn’t moving fast enough? It’s not clear how fast you think research should be advancing and what steps you think should be happening. Do you care to offer some suggestions?

Are you complaining that there is waste, mismanagement, and poor choices in medical research? I don’t think you’d get a major argument that some of that exists, just like it does in every human project.

Exactly what are you concerned about? You haven’t articulated what the problem is that you’re trying to solve, or what you think is wrong.

38

I think Smeghead and some here think we spend some billions of dollars and most or some of these will have cure in 20 years from now.

That is what I was saying and get at.

39

No. I’m saying that if we invest money and resources into research, we will have cures for diseases much much sooner than if we DON’T invest the money and resources. There no guarantees, but it should be pretty obvious that we’re unlikely to solve problems that we don’t work on.

40

I think you’re severely misunderstanding everyone’s argument. No one has said that.