Today, I tuned into a press conference hosted by the National Institutes of Health with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, announcing a new collaborative program to accelerate the current arduous process of bringing drugs from the lab to market. NIH’s new initiative, Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, is a huge step forward for drug development, aiming to expedite and increase efficiency of current protocol.
According to NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., it currently takes 2 billion dollars and 14 years to move a drug from lab to clinic, and very few ever make it to approval. In fact, he says, out of the 4,500 identified diseases today, only about 250 have associated treatment therapies.
To remedy this, NIH’s new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) has partnered with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly and Company to make dozens of its compounds available for the program’s pilot phase. The program, which is slated to offer $20 million in research grants, is intended to match researchers across the country with current pharmaceutical industry compounds to help explore new treatments for patients.
In addition to NIH, other institutions are collaborating to create solutions to the lagging drug-development process once and for all. Last May, one of Spectrum’s clients, The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center—Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC‐James), hosted a Cancer Drug Development Roundtable with Friends of Cancer Research to discuss industry hurdles currently halting the co‐development of two experimental drugs, which could then create more effective cancer treatments and save lives. Similarly to NIH’s initiative, roundtable participants – including representatives from U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute and other industry stakeholders – developed a set of recommendations to address this issue as a follow up to FDA’s guidance document released in 2010. Keeping the most important thing in mind here—the patients—the ultimate goal of OSUCCC-James and NIH’s initiative is to ease the drug-development process and bring revolutionary therapeutic treatments to market faster and with more efficiency.
Dr. Collins of NIH says it best: we need to speed the pace at which we are turning discoveries into better health outcomes. So let’s do that.
What do you think? Will this new program finally solve America’s drug-development dilemma?