Drugs That Are as Smart as Our Diseases

Here's a paradox. Every week seems to bring news from a research laboratory of an ingenious candidate cure about to enter clinical trials for a serious disease. Yet the productivity of drugs coming out of clinical trials has been plummeting, and the cost per drug has been rocketing skyward. The more knowledge swells, the more pharmaceutical innovation fails. What's going on?

This week's promising drug candidate is colchicine, a toxin found in Colchicum, the strange flower that comes up in the fall after its leaves have disappeared (also known as the naked lady or the autumn crocus). By attaching colchicine to a trigger that activates in the presence of a tumor, researchers at the University of Bradford in England have developed a potentially potent cancer therapy.

Meanwhile, somebody in the pharmaceutical industry has had the bright idea of funding research on sponges, having concluded that these simple organisms cannot have survived the best part of a billion years on the ocean floor without inventing smart chemical tricks for defeating bacteria. More than 100 promising antibacterial compounds have already emerged from sponge research.

Genetics is also a big part of our golden age for possible new cures. Reading the genes of pathogens and cancer cells helps to identify targets for therapy, and gene sequencing has gotten cheaper far faster than would be predicted by Moore's Law, which famously holds that transistor density on a silicon chip doubles—while the cost halves—every two years.

Extracted and Adapted from The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2011. Available in < http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904 265504576567070931547618.html?mod=WSJ_hp_ MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird#articleTabs%3Dar ticle>

In the sentence: “Meanwhile, somebody in the pharmaceutical industry has had the bright idea of funding research on sponges”. Meanwhile and research are: