Drugs Looking for Diseases

Book excerpt: We all know how much time, effort and money it takes to develop a new drug. Hundreds of chemical compounds have to be synthesized and thousands of different activities in biology, physiology, pharmacology, clinical investigation, management and marketing have to be initiated and coordinated. Each new drug starts a voyage of discovery through an unmapped terrain which is shrouded in mist and beset by pitfalls, as Dr. Rein Vos puts it in his absorbing inside story of the development of the beta-adrenoceptor blocking agents and the calcium antagonists. Indeed we know, for example, how long it took before the theory of Ahlquist of the alpha and beta adrenergic receptors was widely accepted. Similarly, it suffices to memorize shortly the difficulty of expanding the new concept of calcium antagonism through the national German boundaries into the world. This shows how laborious and complex pharmaceutical progress is, and we all will benefit from a deeper understanding of the process of innovative drug research.