Editor's word : money matters

Abstract

It has been calculated that to market a novel drug a pharmaceutical company has to fork out up to a staggering Euro10,000,000,000 (Source: www. forbes.com/forbes/2012/0312/strategiespharmaceuticals- lilly-stagger-costinventing- new-drugs.html). It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find new moieties and this is driving the expenses further up. Furthermore, the recession does not help. However as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. And one Darwinian lesson which mankind has learnt is, precisely, how to adapt. In fact pharma companies are increasingly starting to explore alternatives to increase profits. After all, profit making is a very simple formula. You either increase income from sales or decrease production costs and examples to reach these goals range from additive printing to nanotechnology to medicinal chemistry. Such techniques are being discovered or rather, rediscovered, as methods by which one can either make existing medicines cheaper, thus making them more accessible resulting in increased sales, or more effective. This editorial will discuss two novel, albeit different strategies to produce more effective medicine