Intro

Many review articles are written every day about drug design. Recently, these reviews often focus on why the whole process is failing. Designing a drug nowadays costs about a billion Euros (a billion is 10⁹...). And every year some big pharma company ceases to exist because they did not find any good new medicine for too many years in a row.

If you Google for blockbuster medicine (in pharma they call it a blockbuster when the sales top one billion dollars per year) you find many pages with similar lists. But against these few successful medicines stand many more failures that all have cost very much money.

Over the years, pharma companies have clinched to methods, ideas, and technologies, hoping that things like high-throughput screening , combinatorial chemistry , rational drug design , etcetera would be the magic bullet. The latest trend is to see if academia can design the new medicines after which pharma companies can sell them (I might be a bit to sarcastic in this sentence).

The scaringly high costs of designing a new drug has as a sadd consequence that no drug design is done for orphan diseases , and drug design for typical third world diseases tends to be done only for diseases that might spill-over to the western world, when the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation funds it, or when the WHO gets involved.

A recent development is to reposition drugs. Repositioning means using a drug for another purpose. Sometimes the side effect of a drug can be used to cure another disease than what the drug originally was meant to cure.

Sometimes the side-effects of a drug become known only after many years (and after many people died from using that drug). In the worst cases the drug was originally approved for use in humans on the basis of fraudulent data. Normally, though, this is caused because of pathological situations. Thalidomide (softenon), for example, wasn't tested on pregnant women and was later found to be devastating to the unborn baby.

Question 64: How much did the life expectancy of humans increase in the western world in the previous century? And which are the main factors responsible for this increase?

Question 65: What is the story about Vioxx?

Question 66: What is the story about Viagra?