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Drug discovery: lessons from evolution
Author(s) -
Warren John
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
british journal of clinical pharmacology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.216
H-Index - 146
eISSN - 1365-2125
pISSN - 0306-5251
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2125.2010.03854.x
Subject(s) - drug discovery , sympathy , humanity , analogy , pharmaceutical industry , engineering ethics , process (computing) , political science , medicine , biology , pharmacology , law , bioinformatics , epistemology , engineering , computer science , philosophy , psychiatry , operating system
A common view within the pharmaceutical industry is that there is a problem with drug discovery and we should do something about it. There is much sympathy for this from academics, regulators and politicians. In this article I propose that lessons learnt from evolution help identify those factors that favour successful drug discovery. This personal view is influenced by a decade spent reviewing drug development programmes submitted for European regulatory approval. During the prolonged gestation of a new medicine few candidate molecules survive. This process of elimination of many variants and the survival of so few has much in common with evolution, an analogy that encourages discussion of the forces that favour, and those that hinder, successful drug discovery. Imagining a world without vaccines, anaesthetics, contraception and anti‐infectives reveals how medicines revolutionized humanity. How to manipulate conditions that favour such discoveries is worth consideration.