The notion that Aging is a medical condition or disease seems murky enough. We should really wait on the Metformin trials to be completed before making such bold statements.
"Barzilai and other researchers plan to test that notion in a clinical trial called Targeting Aging with Metformin, or TAME. They will give the drug metformin to thousands of people who already have one or two of three conditions — cancer, heart disease or cognitive impairment — or are at risk of them. People with type 2 diabetes cannot be enrolled because metformin is already used to treat that disease. The participants will then be monitored to see whether the medication forestalls the illnesses they do not already have, as well as diabetes and death.
On 24 June, researchers will try to convince FDA officials that if the trial succeeds, they will have proved that a drug can delay ageing. That would set a precedent that ageing is a disorder that can be treated with medicines, and perhaps spur progress and funding for ageing research.
During a meeting on 27 May at the US National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Bethesda, Maryland, Robert Temple, deputy director for clinical science at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, indicated that the agency is open to the idea."
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/anti-ageing-pill-pushed-as-bona-f...
Disruption is not possible in drug development. Why?
"Some of that perspective is welcome – the idea that there are always huge opportunities out there waiting for someone with enough speed and nerve to go after them, for one. That’s very Silicon Valley (and it’s also very American) and I think it’s great. But if along the way you pick up the idea that the world of apps, code, and processor speed is the default setting for the world, you can start to see everything that doesn’t advance that way as defective. That’s the Andy Grove fallacy, as I’ve called it (referenced in those links above), the idea that understanding human disease and its treatments should be pretty much like designing a new chip or writing a new app.
There’s another problem that’s not unique to the Valley, although it does tend to give people a bad case of it. That’s the “Clearly I’m smart and successful, so clearly I have something to offer in this other field over here” one. We all succumb to that one now and then; it’s human nature. You can watch Mark Cuban display it here, with respect to medical testing.
But here are a couple of recent examples of the more localized problem. Iwrote last year about Emerald Therapeutics, an outsourced-lab-assay company backed by Peter Thiel (who may also be interested in their antiviral therapy ideas). Here’s another article on them, and it asks, in so many words, “Why is new drug development so comparatively torpid when app development is so torrid?”. I couldn’t provide a more succinct version of the Silicon Valley/biopharma disconnect if I tried."
Source: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/sil...
"How is it possible that the technologies that most people think are important for drug discovery have become hundreds, thousands, or billions of times cheaper, while the cost of R&D, per drug discovered, increased roughly 100 fold between 1950 and 2010?" - Jack Scannell
Missing Mendelian Inheritance was the Pandora's Box of problems that we now face after the Human Genome Project. Sure we have an idea of which proteins are created by which genes, kind of, but figuring out how proteins work has been a complicated problem that can't be brute forced.
In the last 50 years, speed improvements:
1000x faster xray-crystallography protein mapping.....
300x larger protein databases....
10x cost reduction in High throughput testing...
800x number of compounds...combinatorial chemistry...