Dr. David Swinney, Chairman of IRND3, and one of Anatara Medicine’s senior drug discovery advisors, published a paper called “Old Methods for New Drugs” in December 2011. In this article, he describes that fewer than two medicines per year from 1999 to 2008 were developed from the modern pharmaceutical approach that emerged from the sequencing of the human genome in the 1980s:
“Scientists believed that the ability to visualize and understand human biology at a more detailed level would lead to many new medicines. Identifying the defective molecular parts, known as drug targets, should have made addressing the causes of disease easier, and would revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry. And so it has, but without increasing the number of new medicines. In fact, the July issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery analyzed how first-in-class medicines—those drugs that successfully established a new class of medicines, were discovered. In comparison to the old method of screening millions of chemicals in biological systems, the new method of target-based medicines only produced 17 of the 45 new medicines developed from 1999 to 2008.”
Well, what about even older methods for developing new medicines? Last week’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ) featured an article written by Shirley Wang entitled, “Chinese Medicine Goes under a Microscope”. The piece highlights studies in which Yale scientists analyze the effectiveness of a Chinese herb called huang qin tang in reducing the side effects of chemotherapy, and potentially acting as an adjunct to chemotherapy for increasing the efficacy against colon cancer. Human Phase II studies are now being planned in colon cancer patients.
This article does a nice job of gently introducing the concept that Chinese herbs are, in fact, medicines with multiple molecular mechanisms of action—medicines that are anticipated to have very limited side effects as compared with synthetic, single molecular target pharmaceuticals.
To those who understand Chinese medicine, the basis for the herb formula described in the WSJ article is instructive on how it may work with cancer treatment, but there is a much deeper message. There are a considerable number of other herbal formulas that should also be developed for their targeted effects on specific organs and specific biosystems—and ones that won’t likely have the adverse side effect profiles common to chemotherapy drugs.
We at Anatara Medicine believe that the best approach to solving difficult medical problems today is to use a combination of successes from older methods with newer methodology. In terms of classical pharmaceutical development, let’s not throw away the methods that have produced the great majority of our new medicines over the past five decades. In terms of difficult chronic conditions with few medical options — e.g., Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue syndrome, and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, psoriasis, scleroderma, as well as many childhood and adult cancers that fall under the category of rare and neglected diseases—it’s not throwing away hundreds or thousands of years of knowledge accumulated throughout the world.
As Dr. Swinney writes, “The new light of modern medicine, [with its underpinnings in new molecular understandings], in most cases, is [currently] too dim to illuminate the molecular details of the dynamic human biologic machine with sufficient specificity to rationalize the design of new medicines.”
At a rate of 4-5 new medicines per year currently being approved by FDA, the promise of a renaissance of new medicines based on genomics may be quite a challenge to realize. Since human biology is infinitely complex, why not take a systematic and deep approach to natural medicines, ones that have been around for hundreds to thousands of years, and combine them with the best of modern molecular approaches? That is what Anatara Medicine does best, and that is why we can get results where others cannot.