The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 269 No 7217 p433
28 September 2002

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British Pharmaceutical Conference 2002 News

We need to do research like Japan does, says MP

You cannot do research in a country that aspires to be as good as Japan or the United States, when three-quarters of staff involved in research in the United Kingdom are paid lousy wages, do not know whether they have a career structure and wonder if it is even a career worth entering. So said Dr Ian Gibson, MP, Chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, in an address to the Young Scientists Symposium on "Delivering a better future" at the British Pharmaceutical Conference in Manchester on 23 September.

Dr Gibson recalled his time as a research scientist when he had spent half his time trying to get grants for his staff. He thinks that the situation reflects that in schools where science teachers are trying to conform to a curriculum that is outdated, outmoded and going nowhere.

"Young people are turned off because they are not even allowed to do experiments on their own. People want to be healthy and I assume that medicines are going to progress and that young scientists such as you will be the ones making the discoveries," he said.

He compared the situation in Britain with that in Japan, where research is given much more time and money. "The Japanese realise that it may take 20 years to develop a drug and the government gives researchers the money on that basis. Here in the UK we are short-termists, expecting results quickly."

Dr Gibson reminded his audience that there will always be incurable diseases, and gave the example of lung cancer, where despite all the work that has been done little difference has been made in detecting the early stages of the disease and knowing how to treat it. Dr Gibson thinks that banning smoking from every public place in the country would bring a decrease to the incidence of the disease in the population.

Dr Gibson discussed how research is carried out and said that there was more research into health than ever before. He believes, however, that we are still only scratching the surface of our knowledge of diseases such as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia and cystic fibrosis. He said that researchers had estimated that two-thirds of visits to GPs end with no diagnosis being made of what is wrong with the patient. Even when doctors prescribe a drug it would probably only work in about one-third of cases. It is estimated that about one in 10 GP visits end with a text-book diagnosis and appropriate treatment.

Dr Gibson drew the attention of his audience to the 10:90 gap, whereby 10 per cent of the money spent on health research is for diseases that account for 90 per cent of the global burden of disease. Of the $60bn spent on biomedical research each year, for example, only $100m is spent on research into malaria. If the money spent on malaria research was equivalent to the disease burden that it represented, $1.8bn would be spent on research. Political decisions are made about how funding is made into research of certain diseases. Returning to his example of malaria, he thinks that if the will had been there, then a vaccine would have been produced by now. His message is that research has to be given the proper funding. He believes that the UK Government is committed to putting more money into solving this injustice.
—Contributed by Diane Langleben, editor, Hospital Pharmacist.