As an oncologist, I recognize the arduous path to make a new drug. It is a hard trek that lies between the bench and the patient’s bedside. Ordinarily, it takes five or more years just to get a new drug into the clinic for testing. Similar time is needed for clinical trials. Then comes Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, followed by the time it takes for licensing, manufacture, distribution and adoption by physicians.
Ordinarily, this means that 12 or more years might pass before the FDA even begins its evaluation of a new drug or regimen. This is before any therapy becomes part of our disease-fighting armamentarium.
Witness the difference, however, when public-private interests meet in formal partnerships to accomplish the extraordinary. More than one COVID-19 vaccine became available in less than one year since the DNA sequence of the COVID-19 virus was deciphered. And the RNA-based technology used for the first two COVID-19 vaccines to cross the finish line had never been tried before. By comparison, it took four years to get to market the mumps vaccine that was until now the shortest time for vaccine development.
