Is lifelong chronic therapy for diabetes or other metabolic disorders bane or boon? Well, it depends on which side you are on. For big pharma it is a boon but for patients I would say it is not so good an omen. That brings me to a fundamental question. Are big pharma companies deliberately not being able to find “cure” for such diseases? Modern science has evolved a lot especially during the last few decades. We are at the realm of finding evidence for dark matter or other theoretical subatomic particles but we are still far from understanding the how a normal cell functions! There are still some unexplored territory as far as understanding the working of a cell is concerned; forget about human disease or disorders. So it is not a co-incidence that modern science has yet to provide “cure” for most of the diseases although we have been on the winning side in taking head on some infectious diseases (thanks to antibiotics)!
So, what is the way out? Well, the answer is not that simple. We ought to give rightful importance to basic and applied research equally. But here comes the negative part. Research means lot of money and it is foolish to leave all basic research on Governments’ shoulders. The Big pharma ought to put in more money into research. I know of many instances where in big pharma companies have good and interesting data generated, but they do not divulge that fearing competition or deem the information useless in terms of financial benefit. Ultimately, this leads to lot of repetitive research and that means lot of money! So ultimately it is the loss to the public. Also, recently many pharma companies have moved out of research in some disease areas and that leads to a lot of void; a negative approach of pharma on research in new antibiotics is just a point in case.
Even Government funded labs are poor in their approach towards research. Lot of public money is wasted in the name of basic research. I think time has come to delve deeper into our conscience as scientists/policy makers in government and in the private sector. Let us work in a collaborative way to understand disease and disorders , otherwise we would have no one but our ‘greed’ to blame
good job Deb. I heard of a trend which people are thinking of starting in govt. funded research where all the dead end data or not being pursued data will be donated to central database which will have free public access. In this way, interested parties will be benefited whereas the original labs get the acknowledgment. On similar lines, private companies can also share their data to a central database and share limited rights to it if something comes out of it.
ReplyDeletesee, i increasingly hold the view that everything-is-related, and piecemeal efforts are almost certain to fail....so, the fact that basic research does not even attempt to churn out drugs against serious diseases affecting millions of Indians is related to the apparently distant issue of forcible land acquisition from unwilling farmers or destruction of habitat of flora and fauna unique to India....i dont know whatz the way out, but I am sure this is how it is....its like i dont know what is 1234*1234, but, i do know it is not 100
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