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Author: Donald R. Kirsch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1628727195
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
The surprising, behind-the-scenes story of how our medicines are discovered, told by a veteran drug hunter. The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity— by chewing, brewing, and snorting—some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze-age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings. Nowadays, Big Pharma conglomerates spend billions of dollars on state-of the art laboratories staffed by PhDs to discover blockbuster drugs. Yet, despite our best efforts to engineer cures, luck, trial-and-error, risk, and ingenuity are still fundamental to medical discovery. The Drug Hunters is a colorful, fact-filled narrative history of the search for new medicines from our Neolithic forebears to the professionals of today, and from quinine and aspirin to Viagra, Prozac, and Lipitor. The chapters offer a lively tour of how new drugs are actually found, the discovery strategies, the mistakes, and the rare successes. Dr. Donald R. Kirsch infuses the book with his own expertise and experiences from thirty-five years of drug hunting, whether searching for life-saving molecules in mudflats by Chesapeake Bay or as a chief science officer and research group leader at major pharmaceutical companies.
Author: Donald R. Kirsch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1628727195
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Get Book Here
Book Description
The surprising, behind-the-scenes story of how our medicines are discovered, told by a veteran drug hunter. The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity— by chewing, brewing, and snorting—some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze-age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings. Nowadays, Big Pharma conglomerates spend billions of dollars on state-of the art laboratories staffed by PhDs to discover blockbuster drugs. Yet, despite our best efforts to engineer cures, luck, trial-and-error, risk, and ingenuity are still fundamental to medical discovery. The Drug Hunters is a colorful, fact-filled narrative history of the search for new medicines from our Neolithic forebears to the professionals of today, and from quinine and aspirin to Viagra, Prozac, and Lipitor. The chapters offer a lively tour of how new drugs are actually found, the discovery strategies, the mistakes, and the rare successes. Dr. Donald R. Kirsch infuses the book with his own expertise and experiences from thirty-five years of drug hunting, whether searching for life-saving molecules in mudflats by Chesapeake Bay or as a chief science officer and research group leader at major pharmaceutical companies.
Author: WHO Expert Committee on the Selection and Use of Essential Medicines
Publisher: Diamond Pocket Books (P) Ltd.
ISBN: 9789241209205
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 142
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Book Description
This report presents the recommendations of the WHO Expert Committee responsible for updating the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. The first part contains a progress report on the new procedures for updating the Model List and the development of the WHO Essential Medicines Library. It continues with a section on changes made in revising the Model List followed by a review of some sections such as hypertensive medicines and fast track procedures for deleting items. Annexes include the 13th version of the Model List and items on the list sorted according to their 5-level Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical classification codes.
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309292492
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 107
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Book Description
Improving and Accelerating Therapeutic Development for Nervous System Disorders is the summary of a workshop convened by the IOM Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders to examine opportunities to accelerate early phases of drug development for nervous system drug discovery. Workshop participants discussed challenges in neuroscience research for enabling faster entry of potential treatments into first-in-human trials, explored how new and emerging tools and technologies may improve the efficiency of research, and considered mechanisms to facilitate a more effective and efficient development pipeline. There are several challenges to the current drug development pipeline for nervous system disorders. The fundamental etiology and pathophysiology of many nervous system disorders are unknown and the brain is inaccessible to study, making it difficult to develop accurate models. Patient heterogeneity is high, disease pathology can occur years to decades before becoming clinically apparent, and diagnostic and treatment biomarkers are lacking. In addition, the lack of validated targets, limitations related to the predictive validity of animal models - the extent to which the model predicts clinical efficacy - and regulatory barriers can also impede translation and drug development for nervous system disorders. Improving and Accelerating Therapeutic Development for Nervous System Disorders identifies avenues for moving directly from cellular models to human trials, minimizing the need for animal models to test efficacy, and discusses the potential benefits and risks of such an approach. This report is a timely discussion of opportunities to improve early drug development with a focus toward preclinical trials.
Author: Katherine Eban
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063054108
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 523
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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * New York Times Notable Book * Best Book of the Year: New York Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, Science Friday With a new postscript by the author From an award-winning journalist, an explosive narrative investigation of the generic drug boom that reveals fraud and life-threatening dangers on a global scale—The Jungle for pharmaceuticals Many have hailed the widespread use of generic drugs as one of the most important public-health developments of the twenty-first century. Today, almost 90 percent of our pharmaceutical market is comprised of generics, the majority of which are manufactured overseas. We have been reassured by our doctors, our pharmacists and our regulators that generic drugs are identical to their brand-name counterparts, just less expensive. But is this really true? Katherine Eban’s Bottle of Lies exposes the deceit behind generic-drug manufacturing—and the attendant risks for global health. Drawing on exclusive accounts from whistleblowers and regulators, as well as thousands of pages of confidential FDA documents, Eban reveals an industry where fraud is rampant, companies routinely falsify data, and executives circumvent almost every principle of safe manufacturing to minimize cost and maximize profit, confident in their ability to fool inspectors. Meanwhile, patients unwittingly consume medicine with unpredictable and dangerous effects. The story of generic drugs is truly global. It connects middle America to China, India, sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, and represents the ultimate litmus test of globalization: what are the risks of moving drug manufacturing offshore, and are they worth the savings? A decade-long investigation with international sweep, high-stakes brinkmanship and big money at its core, Bottle of Lies reveals how the world’s greatest public-health innovation has become one of its most astonishing swindles.
Author: Marcia Angell
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0375760946
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
During her two decades at The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes the shocking truth of what the pharmaceutical industry has become–and argues for essential, long-overdue change. Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell powerfully demonstrates, claims that high drug prices are necessary to fund research and development are unfounded: The truth is that drug companies funnel the bulk of their resources into the marketing of products of dubious benefit. Meanwhile, as profits soar, the companies brazenly use their wealth and power to push their agenda through Congress, the FDA, and academic medical centers. Zeroing in on hugely successful drugs like AZT (the first drug to treat HIV/AIDS), Taxol (the best-selling cancer drug in history), and the blockbuster allergy drug Claritin, Dr. Angell demonstrates exactly how new products are brought to market. Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective. The American pharmaceutical industry needs to be saved, mainly from itself, and Dr. Angell proposes a program of vital reforms, which includes restoring impartiality to clinical research and severing the ties between drug companies and medical education. Written with fierce passion and substantiated with in-depth research, The Truth About the Drug Companies is a searing indictment of an industry that has spun out of control.
Author: Bernice Z. Schacter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313083258
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Today, most people use prescription medications. Every year, the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry produces new medicines that treat everything from arthritis to AIDS, from high cholesterol to depression. But, despite recent controversies regarding the safety of drugs, consumers know little about the medications that they ingest and inject. How are these new medicines invented? How do consumers know that drugs are safe and effective? How are they tested? Who regulates their production - and who watches the regulators? How do drug companies produce the vast quantities needed for the marketplace, and why do they market their drugs as they do? The New Medicines leads the reader through the maze of the modern drug industry - from bench to bedside - and provides consumers with a step-by-step understanding of how new medicines are created, approved, marketed, and sold. In addition to explaining how drugs reach the medicine cabinet, the author - an experienced researcher and teacher - provides the scientific and business background for understanding the current controversial issues surrounding new medicines, such as: The rise and fall of the COX-2 inhibitors, Vioxx and Celebrex, and the process by which they were invented, approved, and re-evaluated. The saga of the cancer drug Erbitux and its creator, the company Imclone, made famous as the centerpiece of the Martha Stewart insider-trading scandal. The strengths and weaknesses of the approval process of the Food and Drug Administration. The controversial new marketing techniques of the pharmaceutical industry. A balanced work that provides readers with an unbiased look at the drug industry, The New Medicines will answer the questions of anyone who has ever looked at a bottle of their prescription pills and wondered, how did that get here?
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309468086
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.
Author: Ben Goldacre
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865478066
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 479
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Book Description
Originally published in 2012, revised edition published in 2013, by Fourth Estate, Great Britain; Published in the United States in 2012, revised edition also, by Faber and Faber, Inc.
Author: Divya Vohora
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128020989
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 527
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Book Description
Pharmaceutical Medicine and Translational Clinical Research covers clinical testing of medicines and the translation of pharmaceutical drug research into new medicines, also focusing on the need to understand the safety profile of medicine and the benefit-risk balance. Pharmacoeconomics and the social impact of healthcare on patients and public health are also featured. It is written in a clear and straightforward manner to enable rapid review and assimilation of complex information and contains reader-friendly features.As a greater understanding of these aspects is critical for students in the areas of pharmaceutical medicine, clinical research, pharmacology and pharmacy, as well as professionals working in the pharmaceutical industry, this book is an ideal resource. - Includes detailed coverage of current trends and key topics in pharmaceutical medicine, including biosimilars, biobetters, super generics, and - Provides a comprehensive look at current and important aspects of the science and regulation of drug and biologics discovery
Author: Merrill Goozner
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520246706
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
"Goozner shows how drug innovation is driven by dedicated scientists intent on finding cures for diseases, not by pharmaceutical firms, whose bottom line often takes precedence over the advance of medicine. Stories of a university biochemist who spent twenty years searching for single blood protein that later became the best-selling biotech drug in the world, a government employee who discovered the causes for dozens of crippling genetic disorders, and the Department of Energy-funded research that made the Human Genome Project possible - these accounts illustrate how medical breakthroughs actually take place.".
