How hard it is to discover a drug?
There are only 1,453 drugs for all of the infectious diseases, cancers, cardiovascular diseases, skin conditions, neurodegenerative diseases and other ills the flesh is prone to, and that dates all the way back to 1827.
Before joining Washington University in St. Louis, Michael Kinch, PhD, was managing director of the Center for Molecular Discovery at Yale University.
“A few years ago, to motivate the team I gave them what’s called a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (a B-HAG),” Kinch says.
The B-HAG was many-headed but one of the heads was to make a collection of all FDA-approved drugs. The idea was that the collection would serve as a screening library for drug repurposing.
Kinch thought the first step—pulling a list of drugs—would be easy; they’d go the FDA and get their list. But it turned out the FDA doesn’t have a complete list.
They had a running list of all prescribable drugs called the Orange Book. But “all prescribable drugs” isn’t quite the same thing as all the drugs that have ever been prescribed, since there are drugs that are no longer marketed or have been withdrawn because of concerns about safety or effectiveness.
“So what we did was compile a comprehensive list of drugs approved for use in the U.S.,” Kinch said. “By drugs, I mean the actual molecules that do the work, called new molecular entities (NMEs), as opposed to the fillers and the flavors.
We went all the way back to morphine, first sold by Merck in Germany in 1827 and shortly thereafter in the U.S., and worked our way forward to 2013, closing the database at the end of that year.
“How many do you think there were?” he asks.
There were 1,453—only 1,453 drugs for all of the infectious diseases, cancers, cardiovascular diseases, skin conditions, neurodegenerative diseases and other ills the flesh is heir to. “I thought it was rather a small number, myself,” Kinch said.
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