How a Medicine Gets Made
Taught by Cristina Costantino
Cristina Costantino, PhD, is a legitimate nerd with degrees from both M.I.T. and Harvard. After completing her fellowship here in New York while working a second job at a start-up biotech, Cristina decided she needed to make some actual money to pay off her crushing student loan debt. She now works for a subsidiary of the world's sixth largest pharmaceutical company. It may be the dark side, but she likes to think of it as super-translational medicine. You're entitled to your own opinion...
Last year, the FDA approved 27 new drugs, including treatments for diseases ranging from the common (type 2 diabetes) to the extraordinarily rare (homozygous familial hypercholesterolaemia). Each one of these started as a discovery in the lab...followed by, on average, 10 years and ~$5 billion of research, testing and red tape before it became an actual medicine. So, what's the hold up?
In this 90-minute workshop, we'll act as scientists and take a "discovery" through the drug development process. Will we make it through the three phases of clinical trials to final approval? What does it cost, in dollars and lives? Why is the failure rate so high? What does the FDA actually do? How are insurance companies involved? Why can't we give our drug away free...or can we?
Let's discover what actually goes into the making of a medicine.
