Why the inefficiency
can collaborate with anyone they want, so why is (drug discovery) so risky and why is it so slow, and why are we so inefficient?” he asked.
Prof Bountra believes that it is due to both scientific challenges and organisational issues.
“Frankly, for many diseases, we haven’t got a clue, on the molecular level, what causes it.
“Schizophrenia, depression – at the molecular level, we don’t really understand what’s causing symptoms in a particular patient,” he said.
Animal models have long been the mainstay of preclinical drug development, being used to help identify and validate the biological targets of potential drugs, as well as testing their safety and efficacy, among other uses.
However, Prof Bountra does not believe that they are effective in predicting what would happen in a human patient.
“I have seen so many things work in animal models, and you take them into the clinic and they do nothing,” he said.
“I believe animal models have a place – they allow us to test hypotheses in vivo, but just because something works in an animal model, let’s not kid ourselves it’s going to work in patients.”
He also said that we do not have good biomarkers for many diseases.
A biomarker is a biological characteristic, e.g. a protein or molecule, that can be objectively measured to indicate a particular biological state, e.g. response to a drug or the severity of a disease.
“If I do a study in depression, I can’t say to the patient, ‘Are you less depressed today than you were last week?’, or an Alzheimer’s patient, ‘Is your memory better today than it was last month?’
“We need better biomarkers,” he said.
In addition, Prof Bountra said that we do not even know how many drugs already out there actually work.
“Paracetamol or acetaminophen
– we’ve all taken it. Probably a hundred million people across the planet today will take paracetamol.
“We do not know the molecular target of paracetamol,” he said.
“So, if we don’t know how existing drugs work, how are we going to design better?”
Doing the same work
For organisational issues, Prof Bountra worries the most about
duplication.
“Across the world, there are many academics, many biotechs and many pharma companies all working in parallel, in secret, on the same target, on the same idea,” he said.
It’s hardly surprising, he added, as everyone reads the same scientific literature, goes to the same conferences and speaks to the same opinion leaders.
They then go back to their labs and spend the next six to seven years coming up with a proprietary molecule that has a more than 90% failure rate once it goes into clinical trials, he said.
“So if you’ve got 20 companies working on the same thing, if one of them fails, the other 19 will fail as well.
“That is a waste of money, it’s a waste of people’s careers, but most of all, it is a monumental waste of patients.
“The way we’re doing drug discovery today is ethically and morally wrong,” he said.
The other major issue is the inability to reproduce published results.
“Over the past five years, there have been three or four pretty high profile publications from industry, saying that they cannot reproduce 50%-70% of academic literature.
“And I can vouch for it; when I was in industry, there were many occasions when we tried to reproduce published literature and we couldn’t.”
Prof Bountra was previously vice-president and head of Biology at GlaxoSmithKline.
Among the reasons he suspects causes this problem are biological variations and the possibility that many of the biological tools being used in those experiments do not have the exact properties the researchers think they have.
“We need to address that,” he said.