The Future of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and Research

Many individuals assume that pharmaceutical companies are the power horses of all the research done on drug discovery and development. Indeed, that was an accurate assumption several years ago. However, the future of the pharmaceutical industry is changing. Even now, pharmaceutical companies are focusing less on conducting research to discover new active pharmaceutical compounds and are focusing more on making a profit off of the discoveries of others.

Pharmaceutical companies initially were willing to invest in the "new drug ideas" of their own scientists as well as researchers through out the world. However, inevitably a significant number of new medicines would fail to make it past the first stages of testing causing the pharmaceutical company to lose their expensive investment.

More recently, these massive drug companies have realized that they can let drug researchers find other sources of initial investment funding for pharmaceutical research and manufacturing. Once the research conducted on a new drug is able to prove a certain level of safety and efficacy the pharmaceutical companies are ready to snatch it up and carry it through the final, incredibly expensive, stages of FDA testing.

The future of pharmaceutical manufacturing and research, thus, is trending away from the man-powered laboratory "sifting through" of potential pharmacological agents in search of a new medicine. Pharmaceutical research will likely continue to become significantly more targeted to specific diseases and users, and will increasingly rely on the ever-advancing field of technology.

For example, pharmaceutical researchers who identify a potential therapeutic agent will synthesize slightly different versions of the original molecule or compound in an attempt to make it as safe and powerful as possible. The future of pharmaceutical research will see many researchers transition from bench work to the use of computational chemistry. Complex computer programs can be used to model the active drug and drug receptor in humans down to the molecular level. Computational molecular modeling can evaluate the interaction between the drug and the receptor until the ideal drug is found.

The future of the pharmaceutical industry also includes the development of drugs that are tailored to the particular genetic makeup of an individual. The frontier of genetics is rapidly advancing and will likely reach a point in which specific genotypes of interest in individuals can be identified quickly and relatively inexpensively. For example, a group of individuals may have a genotype that causes them to metabolize a medication very slowly creating a higher risk of toxicity. In response, pharmaceutical researchers can develop a subtype of this medication that allows people with that specific genotype to metabolize the drug appropriately.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing and research is taking new and exciting paths in to the future of medicine. Ideally, advances such as the ability to utilize computerized modeling technology, to specifically target medications based on an individuals genetic make up, and many more advances yet to come, will create the safest and most effective pharmaceutical medications the medical field has seen.

Source: Integration Selective Lecture Series, UNC-CH SOM. 2010.