Comments on the State of Medical Biotechnology Development
Via FuturePundit, some comments on the development of medical biotechnology:
My suspicion: most of the remaining problems that chemical drugs haven't cured or slowed down are problems that chemical drugs can't fix. For most of what goes wrong as we age we need gene therapies, cell therapies, and other techniques that are powerful enough to repair or replace aged tissue. Chemical drugs are just too simple in structure and in potential effects. They can't do much tissue repair.The slow rate of cancer drug testing and the regulatory environment that causes the snail's pace is tragic. [If] I was dying of cancer and had months to live I'd volunteer to take a large dose of an experimental drug to find out its toxicity. If I was really lucky I'd be cured. If I was only moderately lucky the drug would kill me quickly so I wouldn't have to spend months in pain slowly dying. I bet if dying cancer patients were given the choice of whether to risk a fast death due to aggressive testing of new drugs enough would say yes that drug testing could be sped up substantially.
The regulators who create this slow drug development environment also place high hurdles in the way of trying stem cell therapies and gene therapies for fatal illnesses. The US FDA has won a court case that gives it broad power to regulate stem cell therapies. Well, FDA regulation basically means "spend hundreds of millions of dollars and spend a decade getting approval". Got a disease that'll kill you 5 or even 10 years from now? Time to get a passport if you don't already have one. When the biotech revolution finally starts arriving with great clinical treatments you'll have to go abroad to get the latest treatments.
We need a faster rate of progress in biotechnology.