New drugs and surgical techniques offer promise in the fight against cancer, Alzheimer's, tuberculosis, AIDS, and a host of other life-threatening diseases. Animal research has been, and continues to be, fundamental to advancements in medicine.
While we must ensure that these dangerous new drugs and precursors do not get in the hands of children or others who would use them improperly, we must also be aware that these same drugs have legitimate uses.
In the wealthy industrialized nations, effective drug therapies against AIDS became available - AZT as early as 1987, then combinations of antiretroviral agents in 1996. The new drugs offered hope that fatal complications might be staved off and AIDS rendered a chronic condition.
Although not yet routine, many cancer centers have the technology to sequence some or all of a patient's cancer genome. This can provide massive amounts of valuable information about your cancer, including whether you have genetic mutations and other abnormalities for which new drugs are available.
Efforts to approach zero risk through exhaustive pre-release testing are extremely expensive and time-consuming. New drugs are delayed in reaching those who need them, and marginal drugs may not be developed at all.
I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs.
My goals over the decade include to develop new drugs to treat intractable diseases by using iPS cell technology and to conduct clinical trials using it on a few patients with Parkinson's diseases, diabetes or blood diseases.
Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.
Socialized medicine allows a nation to exclude a U.S. product from its market if the U.S. firm does not make generous enough price concessions. Accordingly, what has developed is a system within which U.S. firms make large profits on new drugs in the U.S. market, but very low profits on sales everywhere else.
I've never seen crack or a lot of these new drugs. Don't know anything about them. I don't know what they do for you, or whether they do anything good for you or not. But I do still have a lot of faith in the spiritual purity of LSD and pot.
Invent new drugs, that's what you should be doing... fight to get new weirder ones... and weirder establishments to do them in.
Patients who face long odds and terminal illnesses do not always have access to the latest drugs in clinical trials. They don't want to give up, but they don't have years to wait for new drugs to receive FDA approval.
Bacteria evolve, and so they become resistant to existing drugs. Sometimes they revert, depending on how damaging the mutation is to the life cycle of the bacteria. Mutations that give rise to resistance against particular compounds do increase, and that is why you constantly have to have new ones.
IPS cells can become a powerful tool to develop new drugs to cure intractable diseases because they can be made from patients' somatic cells.
The old ethic for medicine [regarding new drugs] used to be: Is it safe and what are the risks? That is no longer adequate. Now people ask, "What goal are we reaching for?
