Innovative drugs, do we know the value of our medicines?

Touch your heart and admit honestly you don’t know, or don’t really know. Our judgment is influenced by a variety of things and people in several ways: price (manifold regulated), our neighbors, friends, objective and subjective experiences with the medicine and quite often our prejudices.

Being the second member of a publication series this booklet first of all aims to show us the facts we often tend to forget, facts that clearly demonstrate the grandiose results achieved by drug research in the past hundred years. Doctors daily use the fruits of these achievements, the medicines to cure their patients and often they themselves don’t think of the underlying work, knowledge, technical know-how and money that are in a tablet or in the small quantity of white powder in an injection vial they prescribe.

This issue discusses six topics of medicine. Alleviating pain has for ancient times been the most important, most noble duty for a doctor. New painkillers have changed our views on this topic too. We should no longer be satisfied with soothing pain as soon as it appears but do all our best to prevent the pain from appearing.

A few decades ago hemophilia has been a dreaded disease. But we were just as much afraid of increased coagulation and its serious consequence, thrombosis. Still some decades ago the malignant process of white blood cell formation has practically been incurable.

We should briefly touch upon the success of drug treatment in pulmonology. Of course progress is not even, diseases of the lung and the airways are not equally treatable. Treatment of pulmonary asthma and prevention of the symptoms are now a realistic aim but pulmonary emphysema or chronic bronchitis is a more difficult job to tackle. But undeniably there is progress in this area too.

Morose, “bitter” people carrying alkali powders in their pocket, not knowing the joys of life were known characters still some decades ago. They suffered from hyperacidity that frequently caused gastric ulcer and even perforation. Solution was brought about by basic research undertaken in this area and now surgical interventions for such symptoms are increasingly rarely done.

We must mention vaccinations that have a crucial role in the prevention of infections caused by viruses. Progress is enormous in this area too, which is due to fundamental changes in production technology.

The emergence of modern contraceptives has made family planning possible, offering a solution to the avoidance of unwanted pregnancy. The danger of becoming pregnant no longer interferes with joy making. Regular, “disciplined” use of hormonal contraceptives could more powerfully reduce the number of undesirable abortions often associated with complications.

We may say with good reason that drug research in the beginning of the 21st century is facing quite new, revolutionary changes. Drug industry is expected to use the results of increasingly successful genetic researches both in prophylaxis and treatment. In the place of medicines that in many cases merely improve the symptoms we will have drugs that completely cure or prevent a disease. And perhaps not in the very distant future doctors will provide “custom tailored” drug treatment to their patients keeping in mind the patients’ genetic endowments.

Prof. dr. Borvendég János