“New drug prices are Astronomical, Unsustainable and Immoral” – Anatomy of Unique Protests

Yes. The quoted sentiment captured in the headline was reportedly voiced recently by many cancer specialists, including researchers and that too in the heartland of pharmaceutical innovation of the world– the United States of America. These specialist doctors argued: “High … Continue reading

‘Disease Oriented Treatment’ to ‘Patient Oriented Treatment’ – An evolving trend

The quest for moving away from conventional and error-prone ‘Disease Oriented Treatment’ paving the way for unconventional individual patient-specific ones, may soon come to fruition. Dramatic progress in the research for developing ‘Personalized Medicines’ could soon offer a choice for … Continue reading

The Concept of Orphan Drugs for Orphan Diseases is Orphan in India

Though the percentage of patients suffering from ‘Rare Diseases’ in India is reportedly higher than the  world average, unfortunately even today such cases get little help from our government. According to experts, diseases manifesting patients representing maximum 6 to 8 … Continue reading

Open Innovation: Quo Vadis, Pharmaceutical R&D?

Is the Pharmaceutical R&D moving from the traditional models to much less uncharted frontiers? Perhaps towards this direction, in November, 2010 in a report titled, “Open Source Innovation Increasingly Being Used to Promote Innovation in the Drug Discovery Process and … Continue reading

Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) are hitting the poor even harder, economically: a time to ponder and a time to act

November 11, 2010 edition of ‘The Lancet’ published an article titled, “Raising the priority of preventing chronic diseases: a political process”. The article enumerated the following: “Chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer, and chronic obstructive respiratory diseases, are neglected … Continue reading

India needs ‘Orphan Drugs Act (ODA)’ to counter growing threat of dreaded rare diseases and simultaneously boost global growth potential of the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry

An orphan disease is a rare and uncommon disease and an ‘Orphan Drug’ is a pharmaceutical substance that has been developed to treat an orphan disease. The US FDA defines a rare disease, with a prevalence of 1 in 5,000 … Continue reading

Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) initiative for the tropical diseases by CSIR and cancer by GlaxoSmithKline deserves a big applaud and support from all concerned.

As the name suggest the ‘Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD)’ is an open source code model of discovering a New Chemical Entity (NCE) or a New Molecular Entity (NME). In this model all data generated related to the discovery research will be … Continue reading

‘Orphan Drugs’ for ‘Orphan Diseases’ – is ‘Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD)’ platform for discovery research the way forward?

To meet the unmet needs of common and dreaded diseases intensive R&D activities are being undertaken by the Pharmaceutical Industry, the world over. At the same time, a percentage of human population, however small, also suffers from some rare diseases, … Continue reading