Slash The Money Going Into Drug Development

I saw this and I thought if there was a place where the typical, GOP slashing-budget style could help, it's here:

The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new medications coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines.

The new effort comes as many large drugmakers, unable to find enough new drugs, are paring back research. Promising discoveries in illnesses like depression and Parkinson's that once would have led to clinical trials are instead going unexplored because companies have neither the will nor the resources to undertake the effort.

...[T]he drug industry's research productivity has been declining for 15 years, "and it certainly doesn't show any signs of turning upward," said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the institutes.

The job of the new center, to be called the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, is akin to that of a home seller who spruces up properties to attract buyers in a down market. In this case the center will do as much research as it needs to do so that it can attract drug company investment.

..."None of this is intended to be competitive with the private sector," Collins said. "The hope would be that any project that reaches the point of commercial appeal would be moved out of the academic support line and into the private sector."

...Creating the center is a signature effort of Collins, who once directed the agency's Human Genome Project. Collins has been predicting for years that gene sequencing will lead to a vast array of new treatments, but years of effort and tens of billions of dollars in financing by drugmakers in gene-related research has largely been a bust.

...Both the need for and the risks of this strategy are clear in mental health. There have been only two major drug discoveries in the field in the past century: lithium for the treatment of bipolar disorder in 1949 and Thorazine for the treatment of psychosis in 1950.

Both discoveries were utter strokes of luck, and almost every major psychiatric drug introduced since has resulted from small changes to Thorazine. Scientists still do not know why any of these drugs actually work, and hundreds of genes have been shown to play roles in mental illness – far too many for focused efforts. So many drugmakers have dropped out of the field.

We aren't discovering new drugs because of our previous efforts in the 1980's to pour money into drug development, and make it more lucrative. It was back in Reagan's heyday, when just being a scientist wasn't enough, and when the private sector seemed shiny and new.

For universities, it was a stupid model from the get-go. Instead of putting scientists to work doing science, we put them to work being entrepreneurs. Scientists aren't supposed to be entrepreneurs, or project managers, or administrators, or anything like that, though. That isn't their function. Instead, we've turned them into gate-keeping trolls on the drug-development superhighway. What they did over the last two decades, as a means to control costs, was to offshore drug testing to Japan, where scientists had more tolerance of the tedium involved, and where they didn't get paid so much money. But this hasn't worked.

Separating out scientific and entrepreneurial functions is the first order of business, and if it works best to create a new center, maybe that's the best. After all, we used to be good at discovering new drugs - when that's what people were paid to actually do - and we can do it again - if that's what people are actually paid to do.

Get rid of the entrepreneurs (aka parasites) and progress can start again.