Jackie Hunter, with arms outstretched, having put 26 miles behind her and raised £5,642.66 for Alzheimer’s research
Jackie Hunter ran a London marathon in 5 hours and 24 seconds with asthma and bum knees. The knees wrenched when she tripped on a wet T-shirt that someone had discarded on a city street early in the course. By mile 7 the pain set in, and by mile 11 she stopped at an ambulance to have the knees bound with bandages. She then persevered to complete the full 26 miles, 385 yards (41.3 kilometres). The event raised money for research into Alzheimer’s disease, one of the neurodegenerative disorders on which her research team at GlaxoSmithKline is concentrating.
Carlo Russo, a physician at GSK focusing on metabolic disorders, did 21 marathons, mostly the famed Boston race in the spring followed by the big New York City race in autumn. Seven times he came in under three hours. (Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France champion, completed the most recent New York Marathon in 2 hours, 59 minutes, 36 seconds.) For the GSK researcher, this long streak of competitive running began with a decision, as he puts it, to switch addictions from nicotine to endorphins. It ended with surgery for a herniated disk in his lower back. Easing up, he now does 100 miles of high-tech cycling on weekends.
Carlo Russo, uphill for an endorphin fix
Then there is Ian Baldwin, a GSK chemist. Last year he did a mega-marathon to honour his sister and to raise money against breast cancer, the disease that killed her at age 31. A series of fast marches punctuated by jogs and sprints, the race crossed 150 miles (240 kilometres) over seven days. Yet it was not so much the distance as the terrain and climate that made the event a prodigious trial: The throng of 585 competitors were doing nothing less than traversing the Saharan desert of southern Morocco. Many needed emergency administration of intravenous fluids, and one of every four dropped out. Ian finished. His time: 42 hours, 56 minutes, 47 seconds. Read more about Ian Baldwin in the Marathon des Sables.
The path to every new medicine is a marathon, too. It extends from 10 to 20 years, and it can easily consume pounds sterling by the hundreds of millions, once the cost of all the inevitable failures is counted in. Any drug with a chance of reaching the pharmacy shelf is the derivation of one of possibly a million or more compounds mass-screened in the laboratory against targets that play a role in disease. The “hit” to emerge from this screening will then be chemically remodelled in an effort to build into it the potency, solubility, and other characteristics it must have to survive continuing development. Passing those tests, it must pass a gauntlet of still others evaluating whether it demonstrates safety and, insofar as laboratory work allows, efficacy in animals, and whether it can be manufactured in quantity and formulated into a pill, an inhalant, or an injection.
Not until this point, three years, five years, 10 years or more into the journey, is the potential medicine ready for clinical studies that may eventually enrol thousands of people. This “first-time-in-humans” passage tends to be cause for celebration in any R&D organization. Yet what is being celebrated is that the odds of failure have by this point been reduced to a mere 90 per cent; only one in 10 compounds entering the clinic ultimately reaches the market.
The marathoners in R&D, like long-distance runners, can not go the distance without careful preparation and staying power. If they reach the finish line, though, the payoff is incalculable. From the scientific heritage of GSK have emerged essential antibiotics, the first therapy for AIDS, several mainstays in the treatment of asthma, widely used medicines for depression, and novel approaches to treating cancer, duodenal ulcers, migraine, heart failure, and diabetes, among other medicines that have helped to advance medical practice. The legacies often outlive the researchers themselves. Indeed, this heritage counts five Nobel laureates. Find out more about one of these Nobelists.
Hence this new, online, multimedia magazine. It intends to give a light onto R&D, its people, methods, and issues. In this initial issue, the magazine looks at the challenges of antibiotics research, the lessons of an R&D executive’s PhD years, and the dilemma of how best to make still experimental drugs available to desperate patients. Also to be found here is what will be a regular item in the magazine: a featured image drawn from the work of R&D. Additional issues will come out quarterly.
Making a medicine is surely one of the most difficult tasks that humankind sets itself, and a task of incessant interest. Welcome to our Marathons.
