Deans' stroke musings: What is the drug development landscape for Brain drugs?

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, October 27, 2014

What is the drug development landscape for Brain drugs?

This quote from Julia Skripka-Serry, BSc, MSc writing in BrainBlogger is instructive.

Is Big Pharma shying away from CNS drugs?
Because the brain remains so poorly understood, Big Pharma are having a bad time developing pharmaceuticals which act upon the central nervous system (CNS). After a number of very loud and painful CNS clinical trial failures in recent years, GSK, AstraZeneca and Novartis have announced total closures of neuroscience divisions globally. Meanwhile Pfizer, Sanofi, Janssen and Merck have begun to significantly downsize CNS operations.
Few remain in the race. And who can blame them, when CNS drug development can cost billions more than any other therapeutic area, yet has a 45% higher chance of failure than drugs targeting other disorders?

With this as the landscape the only hope I can see is for a great stroke association to take charge, plan out a strategy and solicit funds to hire researchers to solve those specific problems identified in the strategy.
Notably like:
the Michael J. Fox Foundation
Myelin Repair and the
Alzheimers Association
I could easily see shilling for donors, asking if they want to donate to the stem cell line of research, or the glutamate poisoning line, or the excitotoxicity line, or their own choice(naming rights available).
Or do they want to support the boring press release line, - F.A.S.T, eat healthy, exercise, prevention, etc.

The existing focus of the ASA, NSA and WSO is not enough to solve any of the problems in stroke. New thinking is required and I doubt that will come from any of them.