MS drugs and the Valley of Death

There are two nice articles in the NY Times on the gap between basic research and drug development that focus on the targeted work of the Myelin Repair Foundation (M.R.F.) to overcome the obstacles to bringing new multiple sclerosis drugs to market that fix damage to myelin.

"Consider two numbers: 800,000 and 21.

"The first is the number of medical research papers that were published in 2008. The second is the number of new drugs that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/helping-new-drugs-out-of-academias-valley-of-death/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/fostering-a-team-approach-to-drug-cures/

Another important angle not addressed in those articles is the fact that we don't really know the underlying mechanism of MS. There are a lot of drugs developed on the basis of the autoimmune theory and certainly the immune system is involved in MS, but it's still not been shown that that is the underlying cause of MS.

sho

[essdipity]

Good reading, highly recommended.

Thanks, sho

ess

[HVAC]

Thanks great source as usual.

The other angle is $22 million was asked from Congress for MS research for 2009 we got $4 million. This year we are asking for $15 million and expect $2 million if we are lucky. The MS Caucus Members say don't hold your breath. The funding is mostly private. We still can't get Congress to pass a registry to find out how many people in the US really have MS. I had never thought about it.

Alex