Drug development is a science, not politics

First, a disclaimer, I worked as a drug discovery scientist for more than a decade working on different projects including anti-HIV and antibacterial. I was fortunate enough to work in such a creative enterprise with some of the best talents in the world in academia as well as in the pharma industry. So, this blog post is based on my training and experience as a drug discovery scientist.

Drug development is not an easy endeavor. It is a risky, expensive, and prolonged process with absolutely no guarantee of success. Many countries in the world where protection for intellectual property for drug development is non-existent or pathetically inadequate don't even engage in this endeavor even though their population needs new drugs for almost every lethal disease that exists in this world. These countries depend entirely on developed countries for drug discovery, even for the drugs for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis that are eradicated from most developed countries but are very much a public health concern in most other countries. Drug development is a scientific endeavor, a very challenging and complex problem, it's not politics and the two should not be mixed.

There are arguments on various social media platforms in India about different types of medicines like allopathy, homeopathy, Ayurveda, home remedies, alternative medicine, or whatever. This argument is more emotional or political than a scientific argument. There is no data, no experiments, or any scientific principles that are debated, there are just accusations and counter-accusations, just like most political discussions. The debate is devoid of any scientific spirit and temper. People engaging in the debate are not even interested in knowing how a drug is developed or approved, they only want to prove the other side wrong, by hook or crook. Once politics enters any argument the first two causalities are rationality and common sense.

Either something is a medicine (drug), or it's not. Over the period of time, the scientific community and governments have developed a reliable, reproducible, and verifiable mechanism to evaluate the approval of a drug. It is called clinical trials, and the data submitted for this purpose is publicly available, almost every country has a competent body to evaluate such data, for example, the US has Food and Drug Administration (FDA). If there is no such data, it cannot be called medicine, it is that simple, it can be anything else but not medicine or an approved drug. So, there is no secret sauce to develop any drug or medicine, there is no need for a statement of an expert, you just need clinical data that can be verified by an independent body. So, anyone or any company claiming anything as a drug doesn't need any celebrity, govt backing, or opinions, just producing clinical data, proving the drug's safety and efficacy, and getting the approval. You just need one reproducible experiment with verifiable data to prove or disapprove any scientific hypothesis right or wrong, it's that simple, but it's not at all easy as collecting such data may not be easy in some cases. Drug development is science, not politics.

Thanks for reading and please share your opinion about this topic. 

Alternative medicine - does it really work?

Ayurveda is an Indian system of traditional medicine, it is also considered a Hindu system of traditional or alternative medicine. Alternative medicine is very popular in India and a few other countries from the same region like China, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and they have their own system of alternative medicine. Before the origin and popularity of allopathic medicine, most of the diseases and alignments were treated by using traditional medicinal knowledge. Ayurvedic texts are very old and they contain very detailed information about various diseases, their symptoms, and ways of treating or preventing them. I think it places more emphasis on prevention rather than cure, it recommends leading a very disciplined lifestyle with a balance of work, exercise, proper food, and peace of mind. But in today's world, it is often impossible to follow such a routine, some people can still manage to do that but most of us find it very hard.

Because of technological inventions new methods of diagnosis and treatment are developed in modern medicine. Since the birth of the pharmaceutical industry and some major breakthroughs in drug discovery, there has been a continuous supply of new drugs for life-threatening diseases. I think this revolution led people to believe that anything can be cured by available drugs and they can get away with their erratic lifestyle and food habits with the help of pills. In this scenario, there is little scope for traditional medicine as it doesn't offer instant solutions or reliable cures for many diseases (like cancer, high blood pressure, AIDS, etc.). The world population suffering from these alignments is increasing day by day and the cost of drug discovery is also increasing for many reasons. This led to a situation where practitioners of alternative medicine (as well as its manufacturers) started making tall claims that they could cure cancer or AIDS with the help and herbs or some other methods to attract patients towards them. There is no scientific study or reliable data that can validate these claims. Many people from developing countries (like India) who can't afford expensive treatments or medicines choose to go with these alternative medicines. Many of them even claim to benefit or get cured by these treatments. I think the placebo effect plays a major role here. Most of the formulations of traditional medicines are not tested in the lab for the concentration of their active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) and very often clinical trials are not performed. It's not that allopathy or modern medicine is a full proof cure without any problems, these medicines have side effects (sometimes very serious and life-threatening), sometimes pharma companies make some mistakes or there were some instances of professional malpractices, but overall, the pharma industry is doing a decent job in serving patients. The modern pharma industry has set protocols for drug development and its clinical trials. Agencies like the FDA (in the US) try to monitor drug development and introduce new regulations from time to time to make the process of drug discovery and consumption more safe and reliable. However, similar things can not be said about traditional medicines as they don't have any controlling or regulating authority like the FDA and because of this there is a lot of inconsistency in their quality and performance.

In today's world we can not depend on some system that was in use several hundreds of years ago, it's really sad that in India we could not make proper use of this knowledge to develop drugs of our own. Many big pharma companies developed drugs from natural products (Ayurved is all about using natural products) but in India, we failed to use this traditional knowledge and also failed to use modern discoveries in various fields to improve this knowledge. There is still hope that this situation can be changed but people should not be emotionally attached to this knowledge and should be open to accepting some criticism and able to analyze it without any bias. If we can do this then I am sure we are bound to gain many good things out of this. Every culture has a tremendous amount of traditional knowledge, we need to explore these resources and use these treasures for our own benefit.

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic.

References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayurveda
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopathic_medicine

(Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing)