End of Drug Discovery
Discovery
BBC
4.3 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 8 October 2012
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We are in desperate need of new medicines for the major diseases facing us in the 21st Century such as Alzheimer's and obesity. And we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against bacteria that are now resistant to many old varieties. As bringing new and improved drugs to patients becomes more difficult and more expensive - it can take 20 years and around $1 billion to bring a medicine to market - Geoff Watts asks what's gone wrong and what can be done to get new pharmaceutical treatments to patients.
Geoff talks to a number of researchers who have worked both within the pharmaceutical industry and publicly funded laboratories to get their views on why the source of drugs has dried up. These include Dr Patrick Vallance, of global pharmaceutical giant GSK, Professor Paul Workman of the Institute of Cancer Research, and Professor Chas Bountra of Oxford University's Structural Genomics Consortium.
They argue that the age of the blockbuster drug which can treat millions of patients is over and that we don't know enough science to be able to find treatments for conditions like Alzheimer's disease. Tilli Tansey, Professor of the History of Modern Medical Science at Queen Mary University in London puts the state of drug discovery in its historical context.
(Image: Pills and capsules. Credit: Science Photo Library)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:08.9 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.2 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by their own light, |
| 0:23.9 | and that light is to be recognised by others. |
| 0:26.5 | The Long History of Heroism with me, Rory Stewart. |
| 0:29.5 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.6 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:35.4 | For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, |
| 0:39.5 | go to BBCworldservis.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:45.5 | All bacterial infections are treated with antibiotics, |
| 0:49.0 | and one of the real problems nowadays |
| 0:50.7 | is that we are running out of antibiotics |
| 0:53.1 | to treat some of the most serious and indeed some of the most antibiotic resistant infections. |
| 0:58.8 | And the sorts of places in hospital where we often come across these infections are in intensive care. |
| 1:03.5 | Consultant microbiologist Dr. Drayden. |
| 1:06.6 | On a ward at the Royal Hampshire Hospital in Winchester, he's dealing with one of the current realities in medicine, a shortfall in the flow of new drugs. |
| 1:16.0 | For example, we've got a patient behind us who has quite a few underlying conditions, but out in the community was treated by her GP with a series of antibiotics for urinary associated infections. |
| 1:29.9 | The organisms causing those urinary infections have become progressively more resistant. |
| 1:35.1 | In her case, she has a septicemia, so that means blood poisoning with bugs in the bloodstream |
| 1:40.1 | from her urinary tract. That was the focus of the infection. And the bug causing that is an E. coli, a common bug that we all carry. |
| 1:48.1 | But this one is resistant to most of the antibiotics that are available to treat these infections. |
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