Many bloggers will write today similar words, exactly 50 years after Dr Martin Luther King said his famous words….. and dreamed of a world with no distinction of race, religion and one being equal. Today people on our planet are still dreaming, albeit changes in many parts of our modern society.
I dream of a world with no distinction of disease, equal research efforts and causes discovered. Still the pharmaceutical industry spent most of their astronomical R&D budgets on only a few dozens of diseases where the business models make sense. What they seem to overlook is that, 50 years from now, rare diseases, due to population growth and subsequent genetic mutations, have become altogether the major part of diseases in the world. Where many common ones can be solved by change….what change? Well just our lifestyles…
Combine this with healthcare systems aimed at symptom management, using lifetime drugs with little efficacy and you will understand that not only patients are sick, but the whole system is. Admitted we have had major jumps in our health system, like the aspirin, polio vaccination, and recently HIV drugs, but why it is now all about risk avoidance, liability limits and exorbitant long development times with over 50% failure?
I sincerely believe that patients deserve earlier access to experimental medication, but we also need to apply cross functional thinking, like in my industry, when there is an incident, we need to find the root cause. Well, in diseases we should too… Genomics is big today, but we’ve only just started and like with every IT system if you put shit in, you get shit out… Mmmmh, looks like the current modern food chain 😉
Martin Luther King could not imagine what his words meant for humanity, nor was he able to witness his dream, as sadly many patients won’t either. However Walt Disney said “if you can dream it, it can come true”. Who knows 50 years from now, my blog will be cited for the same words.
I have a dream…
One Man.
