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Crunch Time© John McManamy
"Forget the Prozac, one wants to scream. Prozac represents the past. Show us your CRF antagonist ..."
"We are going to have to go beyond neurotransmitters to cells." The speaker was Gary Tollefson MD, PhD, Vice President of Eli Lilly Research, and in that statement was the implicit admission that our current meds are to future meds what surgical saws are to laser surgery. He also said we are moving from "receptorology" to molecular genetics, "the next new vista of drug discovery." But the major pharmaceuticals may lack the financial resources to take on the challenge, if one reads between the lines of Dr Tollefson's talk, even though last year Eli Lilly rang up $2.6 billion dollars on Prozac alone. According to Dr Tollefson, to take a drug "from bench to bottle" costs between $400 and 900 million and takes 10 to 12 years. Seventy-five percent of the costs of drugs are attributable to failures, some 999 in a thousand that are abandoned in the pipeline To maintain current shareholder returns, drug companies would have to launch three new blockbuster drugs each year (each with $500 million in annual sales), but the reality is only four percent of all drugs generate sales of this magnitude. Paradoxically, the trend is away from one-size-fits-all blockbusters to tailor-made drugs targeted at specific subgroups (which is occurring in cancer drugs). Alan Metz MD, Vice President of Neuroscience at GlaxoSmithKline, listed some of the practical problems in developing psychiatric drugs: For one, animal studies don't lend themselves readily to mental disorders (try asking a rat how it feels). Then there are problems getting drugs into the brain past the blood-brain barrier. Finally there is the FDA. Ironically, to get FDA approval for a drug to treat bipolar depression, one has to show the drug does NOT work for unipolar depression. Not surprisingly, the drugs we are taking, new as they may seem, are relative clunkers, throwbacks to the labs of the sixties and seventies. Carol Tamminga MD of the University of Maryland and Chair of the FDA Advisory Committee on Psychiatric Drugs, put it much more politely: "Conceptually," she said, "these are not new drugs." New antidepressants under development include CRF antagonists and substance P antagonists. Future drug targets include second messenger systems, gene translation, cellular growth factor, and the cytokine system. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Crunch Time in Depression is owned by Kathy Brewis. Permission to republish Crunch Time in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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